Awareness and demystification, contextualization and translation, dialogue and communication, community and organization, action and transformation, reflection… These are some of the keywords proposed by this week’s readings, which work towards establishing an alternative pedagogical practice, a praxis, that is built upon mutual understanding and support, a sense of “being with.”
Aimé Césaire posits that we need to be aware of how colonialization has not placed civilizations in contact; rather, between colonization and civilization exist “relations of domination and submission…colonization = thingification” (173). This process of “thingification” often establishes itself through a violence that seeks to erase the voice of the oppressed– Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o points to this relationship when he poses the question of why an African writer becomes “so obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other tongues” rather than enriching his or her own (435), identifying the primacy of English, the “language of colonization” (436), as cultural domination and proposing a return to writing in African languages as an action of resistance. There, it becomes clear that one of the ways the colonizer maintains power is through a colonization of language and meaning, to control the very ways that the oppressed express themselves and communicate.
Thus, I turn to the interventions proposed in these texts as practices that work towards decentering what it means to have a dialogue. Augusto Boal gives us one example: embodied dialogue through “el cuerpo humano, principal fuente de sonido y movimiento” (22). Boal emphasizes a dialogue between spectator and performer, giving everyone a participatory role, and suggests that theater can become a weapon when it is in the hands of the people: “[debemos] transferir al pueblo los medios de producción del teatro para que el pueblo mismo los utilice” (17)– Language and dialogue should be contextualized and translated by the people, who then use it, together as a community, as a source of action and transformation.
It is important to note here that liberation does not end with the act of transformation itself; in fact, without proper reflection, there lies the danger of returning to a system of oppression. Here, we may consider how Paulo Freire suggests that it is easy to “confuse freedom with the status quo…the oppressed must not become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both” (36, 44). I would also fixate on how the maintenance of the status quo can come from a confusion of freedom with interpellation; when Freire emphasizes the importance of creating a pedagogy that is “forged with, not for, the oppressed” (48), it is clear that the humanist project in this pedagogy comes from breaking the dependent relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. To replace this relationship of domination, we may instead strive towards a coexistence grounded in “true generosity” and “being with” (45)– and above all the ability for the oppressed to dictate the own terms of their freedom.
Boal, Augusto. Teatro do Oprimido. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1991. Print.Thiong'o, Ngugi wa. "The Language of African Culture" Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. eds. Patrick Williams, and Laura Chrisman. 435-455. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 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.