Against coloniality: Toward an epistemically insurgent curriculum

Abstract

This study interrogates the colonial and Western epistemology underlying mainstream curricula and proposes a decolonial approach that can build an epistemically insurgent curriculum that takes into account non-Western epistemologies. We begin with an analysis of coloniality in Western culture and knowledge systems, including in education. Then, building on the epistemological challenge proposed within decolonial literary works by Pablo Neruda, Eduardo Galeano, and Josías López Gómez, we describe how history and literature curricula can foreground non-dominant saberes (ways of knowing) that call into question the monopoly on understanding claimed by Western modes of reason, and how they can participate in the ethical and analectical project of attending to the being and agency of those who have been marginalized. This approach can help teachers and students to participate in building a sophisticated global border thinking and can provide them with new conceptual tools to make sense of their own realities.

Introduction: Outlining decolonial theory

While the field of education has long been interested in critically rethinking the limits of its conceptions of culture, curriculum, and knowledge, recently an important body of theory, centered in but not restricted to Latin America, has emerged to challenge important assumptions and foundations in educational theory and practice. Decolonial theory renews a now familiar challenge to monoculturalism and Eurocentrism in education, but the nature of its challenge is more radical than those that have come before. Scholars associated with this tradition, including Enrique Dussel (1985, 2007), Walter Mignolo (2000, 2011), Aníbal Quijano (2000), Catherine Walsh (2010), and others, point not just to the deep influence of cultural assumptions on understandings of the canon or pedagogical approaches, but also to the determining force of historical and contemporary relationships of colonialism and coloniality to the most basic understandings and praxes of knowledge production. Beyond exposing the mutual imbrication of power and knowledge that is familiar in critical theory and pedagogy, decolonial theory demonstrates the dominative force and drive that inhabits Western epistemologies and the intellectual projects that these epistemologies have produced, as well as the ways that Western modernity has been coextensive with a violence against and refusal of non-Western and indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Decolonial theory presents a much more radical challenge within education than multicultural education as we have known it, to the extent that the latter depends to a large degree on a Western epistemological framework even as it contests the limits that determine which cultures are privileged and valorized in schools and universities. Furthermore, decolonial theory pushes beyond the postcolonial project that has had an important influence in educational studies. While postcolonial theory (e.g. Said, 1979; Spivak, 1988) has exposed a global Eurocentrism that decides who is centered and who is not in text, discourse, and science, decolonial theory presses this critique to the roots of epistemology and ontology. For decolonial theory, the question is not simply the shifting relations between foreground and background, but rather the fundamental matrix of domination that secures the rights of the West above and against its Others. And while postcolonial theory has been adept at showing the insidious sleights of hand that operate to guarantee the authority of mainstream readings, it has generally depended on a poststructuralist theoretical toolkit whose own implication in Western modernity remains uninterrogated. Beyond exposing the global interpenetration of cultures, decolonial theory proposes a project of “delinking” (Mignolo, 2011) that assumes a fundamental integrity for non-Western and indigenous epistemologies autonomously from Western and Northern ones.

Moreover, theorists associated with the decolonial project have articulated an analysis that exposes a range of dimensions of domination that has characterized colonial relationships historically. This is not a haphazard assemblage but rather an organized “coloniality of power,” as Quijano (2000) puts it, that comprises economic, epistemological, subjective, gendered, cultural, and ontological dimensions. These different historical expressions of domination are united within the project of dispossession and annexation that characterizes colonialism itself but that lives more generally at the heart of Western modernity. Decolonial theory recuperates Fanon’s (1963) project of thinking about economic exploitation together with racism and psychic violation. Decolonial theory shares with Marxism a fundamental critique of capitalism as a violent and dominative mode of production. At the same time, decolonial theory challenges the tendency within Western Marxism itself to marginalize the Global South and to reproduce in its own narratives the dependency of the “periphery.” Starting from this synthetic impulse, decolonial theory seeks to characterize the pernicious and manifold expressions of dominative power within the unifying problematic of coloniality. As a result, in this project, epistemological considerations have a weight equal to political–economic ones, against economistic interpretations; however, the material dispossession and exploitation of peoples is also centered in contrast with interpretations that seek to understand power solely in terms of discourse.

Education is tied in the past and in the present to the project of reproducing the matrix of coloniality. This is not only a matter of reproducing particular orientations, biases, and predilections among students but is also a question of the compulsive repetition of the ethical and epistemological order of Western modernity. Thus, even when curricula in the USA are careful to avoid negative characterizations of non-Western civilizations as primitive or backward, these civilizations, cultures, and vantage points are still represented as distant echoes or imitations of the West (De Lissovoy, 2010; Grande, 2004). Furthermore, the material and political structures of domination that continue to characterize the relationships between the Global North and South are studiously ignored in education from primary school through the undergraduate years. Above all, the basic epistemological and ethical stance of the West—that it can unilaterally know and determine the right and the true for itself and all others—is preserved in the basic gestures of its most celebrated intellectual, political, and cultural projects. These gestures are taught and learned at school (Paraskeva, 2011).

For these reasons, interventions in education and curriculum in particular are an urgent part of a larger decolonial agenda. In the approach to curriculum that we present here, we aim to bring the implications of this agenda to light in relation to the teaching of literature and history. We aim to push past the limits of multiculturalist and criticalist orientations and to show the possibility of different relationships to knowledge and globality in teaching and learning. It is our belief that the curriculum might become a crucial site in which to participate in the production of a different kind of being with others at the scale of the global—one characterized by autonomy, coexistence, and dialogue, rather than by domination and annexation.

Curriculum and epistemic insurgency

This article problematizes the colonial and Western epistemological assumptions underlying mainstream curricula in the USA and throughout the Americas. It proposes a decolonial approach that can serve as the foundation for an epistemically insurgent curriculum that takes into account non-Western epistemologies. Catherine Walsh has suggested the term “political-epistemic insurgency” as a way “to reveal the political and epistemic ‘actionings’ that find their ground in and assemble social, collective, and ancestral knowledge, action, and thought” (2010: 203). In this article, we start from Walsh’s call to propose the inclusion of alternative epistemologies through new approaches to presenting history and literature in curriculum. As Walsh explains:

In contrast to resistance and defensive opposition, insurgency—in the way that I understand and I employ it here—marks and suggests a proactive protagonism of creation, construction and intervention that today—and possibly more than in any other time in history—is assuming force. (Walsh, 2010: 202)

The notion of insurgency has an important historical resonance as well. In particular, the historical figures that started and led the revolutionary social movement in México in the 19th century, such as Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos y Pavón, Ignacio Aldama, Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez, and Guadalupe Victoria, are called insurgentes (insurgents). In other countries in Latin America, these insurgents are called proceres (founding fathers), such as El Libertador, Antonio José de Sucre, and Francisco de Miranda. This distinction is suggestive. For historical reasons, while these latter leaders are seen as founders in Venezuela or Perú, in México they are considered as the spearheads of a social movement, the proactive creation of a new political breaking point (Preciado, 2016). In this study, we build on this legacy in our use of the notion of insurgency and apply it to the epistemological dimension of curriculum.

Curriculum development provides a crucial opportunity to articulate this insurgent knowledge. We are not proposing the abandonment of all Western knowledge as a theoretical metanarrative in order to impose another non-Western metanarrative. Rather, we are trying to problematize the notion that the West should provide the singular canon of knowledge in curriculum. In other words, we are trying to challenge the idea of Western knowledge as a kind of epistemological finish line. By teaching Western categories as unique and exceptional, contemporary schools often create the sense that there is an epistemological border that students must not cross, lest they risk falling into a realm beyond knowledge altogether.

Developing new decolonial approaches starting from Abya Yala ¹

The structuring of school and university curricula within Western frameworks is problematic since there are many important non-Western perspectives that can enrich and extend the creation of knowledge. We propose to take into consideration decolonial frameworks in order to study curricula and to build an epistemically insurgent curriculum. We start from decolonial authors, including Frantz Fanon (1963, 1967), Aníbal Quijano (2000), Walter Mignolo (2000), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2006), Enrique Dussel (1985, 1990, 2007), Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007), Ramon Grosfoguel (2008), Catherine Walsh (2010), and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009).

It is important to note that critiques of colonial thinking are not new. Arguably, Hatuey, the Taíno indigenous warrior of the colonial island of La Española (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), was one of the first to identify Western knowledge as a colonial discourse. After him, Antonio Montesino emerged in 1511 as the teacher who introduced critical thinking to Bartolomé de las Casas. In the modern period, Fanon has been one of the crucial thinkers to have critiqued the intellectual dimensions of colonialism. Fanon addresses this theme in terms of the condition of alienation: “Insofar as he [the intellectual] conceives of European culture as a means of stripping himself of his race, he becomes alienated” (Fanon, 1967: 224). Fanon elaborates on this point as follows:

We realize that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the native’s head the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality. (Fanon, 1961: 211)

Fanon shows that colonialism is a psychic and epistemological process as much as a material one. Building on this insight, Quijano has been one of the crucial thinkers to have critiqued the intellectual dimensions of colonialism. Quijano (2000) makes a crucial distinction between colonialism and coloniality. For him, colonialism refers to the historical, economic, and legal process by which Europe appropriated the American continent, while coloniality is an ongoing cultural structure that reinforces the idea that the West is identified with civilization and that whatever is outside of it is barbarism. In this regard, coloniality involves a central struggle over knowledge, given that Western categories have been used to research not only the West but also to study non-Western societies. As Mignolo (2000) has explained, linguistic maps, literary geographies, and the production of knowledge are part of the same epistemological order that has set the limits of “serious” knowledge and literary production. Mignolo and Tlostanova (2008) explain how coloniality is a matrix of power comprised of the following elements: 1) the economic aspect, within which massive appropriation of land and exploitation of labor occurred by means of colonial possessions; 2) the dismantling and overruling of other existing forms of authority among indigenous peoples of the American continent; 3) the control of sexuality and gender in forms compatible with the mode of economic control; 4) the control of knowledge and subjectivity.

These colonial assumptions have had a huge impact on curriculum (De Lissovoy, 2010; Paraskeva, 2011; Walsh, 2010). Indeed, this Western perspective is evident in the foundations of mainstream curricula, as critical scholars have pointed out (e.g. Britzman, 1995; Kumashiro, 2001; McCarthy, 1998). Further, this Western epistemological hegemony has led to a kind of “academic apartheid’’ (Padilla and Chavez, 1995) or an “apartheid of knowledge’’ (Delgado Bernal, 2002) that powerfully affects educational experiences. This effect can be described in terms of an epistemicidio (epistemicide), which is a term used by De Sousa Santos (2009) to indicate the way in which the Western worldview has destroyed saberes (ways of knowing) around the world as part of its larger project to oppress and exploit the peoples of the world. Today, this epistemicidio also results in the construction of a barrier of knowledge that impedes students and scholars from using non-Western categories to build new knowledge. Since the basis of the curricula at many schools consists of the same Western categories and frameworks, it is difficult for students to move beyond the Western epistemological canon.

Decolonial aims, decolonial methods: Analectics

This study undertakes a theoretical and epistemological analysis of decolonial approaches to curricula. Specifically, we make use of the analectical method of the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel:

The analectical refers to the real human fact by which every person, every group or people is always situated “beyond” (ano-) the horizon of totality … The analectical moment is the support of new unfoldings. The analectical moment opens us to the metaphysical sphere (which is not the ontic one of the factual sciences or the ontological one of negative dialectic), referring us to the other. Its proper category is exteriority. The point of departure for its methodical discourse (a method that is more than scientific or dialectic) is the exteriority of the other. Its principle is not that of identity but of separation, distinction. Dussel (1985: 158).

Dussel has spent much of his career pointing out that Eurocentrism is the dominant perspective on which the myth of modernity in America has been constructed. In our search for decolonial curricular approaches, Dussel’s analectic method is helpful. Dussel (1990) points out that while Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard all criticized Hegelian dialectics, Levinas is a key figure in this regard since he emphasized the necessarily ethical dimension of the criticism of modernity. Nevertheless, Dussel indicates the extent to which the critiques made by these philosophers are still modernist ones, and he points out that even Levinas’ questions are still Eurocentric. Dussel explains that from these perspectives Latin American, indigenous, African, and Asian peoples show up only as objects or things. On the basis of this critique, Dussel proposes an analectic thinking that can exceed dialectics. Dussel describes how dialectics, as a Eurocentric method, goes from basis (Eurocentric notions) to entities (Eurocentric subjects) and from entities (Eurocentric subjects) to basis (Eurocentric notions), whereas analectics emerges not from the Western ego cogito (from the perspective of which oppressed peoples are objects), but rather from those on the periphery of the totality of Euro-ethnocentrism (i.e. from the people of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and others).

In analectics, the face of the Other is the starting point for alternative knowledge. In this respect, the process of knowledge creation is determined by ethics. For Dussel (1985), the analectic method arises from the revelation of the Other. The steps of this method consist of passing from the ontic perspective of the self to the ethical study of the Other; it is the disruption of the episteme from the starting point of ethics. In this study, we aim to disrupt the dominant channels of curriculum by listening to marginalized histories expressed through stories of the Other. We have attended to the revelation of the Other in listening to stories of oppressed peoples through alternative vehicles of knowledge: poetry and narratives. This is reflected in our selection of texts to analyze.

Thus, Pablo Neruda’s Canto General challenges the Western logocentric way of talking about histories of America. Neruda uses a “non-rational” means (poetry) to explain a “rational” subject: history. Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del Fuego uses short stories to confront historical sources, exposing the fictional features of history. He allows the silenced voices of the Americas to emerge, expanding beyond colonial versions of history. In doing so, Galeano makes visible the fact that narratives themselves are ways of knowing. We have selected Canto General and Memoria del Fuego because these works are some of the few that use literature to talk about the history of the Americas as an entire continent, rather than focusing on an individual country. We also consider the complex cosmovision of the text Sakubel k'inal jachwinik by Josías López Gómez, which expresses a multidimensional and indigenous understanding of the world, and we contrast it to paternalistic representations of indigenous voices in mestizo literature.

Building an epistemically insurgent curriculum

There is a marked homogeneity of curricula due to the prioritization of Western frameworks. Against this homogeneity, the goal should be to teach that there is not only one way to think; to this end, it is necessary to deconstruct the epistemological foundations underlying curricula, including dominant understandings of difference (De Lissovoy, 2010). Similarly, Cameron McCarthy describes the risk of using any culture “as a foil for the other” (1998: 156); sometimes the inclusion of the differences in curricula “can serve less to describe who a group is, and more to prescribe who a group ought to be” (Kumashiro, 2001: 5). For instance, Tara Yosso (2002) explains how the curriculum can be dedicated to African-American or indigenous histories, but at the same time can reinforce standards about “the American way” to be, to live, and so on.

In this section, we outline an insurgent curricular approach that would use literature as a way to rethink history by incorporating non-Western epistemologies in curriculum and interrogating the Western perspective on history. The curriculum we propose is political because challenging the Western perspective on history is not a technical matter; it is a political and pedagogical decision, which involves confronting epistemological privilege (Mignolo, 2000).

Neruda’s Canto General

An important starting point for an insurgent reframing of history through literature is Pablo Neruda's Canto General (1978). Neruda provides an alternative history curriculum through his poetry, which uncovers the limits of Western ways of knowing. Using poetry to approach history, Neruda challenges the Cartesian thinking of Ego-logy, which refers to the Western principles of knowledge (“I think”) and subjectivity (“I am”), twisted by Descartes into “I think, therefore I am”—a formation in which knowledge was placed before and above being (Grosfoguel, 2008).

Through the reading and analysis of poetry, students can learn in more depth about historical and sociological problems. In this way, poetry has epistemological implications, problematizing the role of the word and raising the possibility of narrative as a way of knowing. As Valentin Voloshinov explains, “It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around—expression organizes experience” (1973 [1929]: 85). That is, narrative is a central mode through which people create experience. For Voloshinov, language is not an abstraction but rather a continuously generative and creative process. In this manner, poetry represents the uncertain gap between art and science in the sense that poetry expresses in itself the social construction of knowledge: “Linguistic creativity does not coincide with artistic creativity nor with any other type of specialized ideological creativity. But, at the same time, linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it” (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]: 98). In this sense, if we understand the word as a social construction, the word is what gives experience its specificity.

A decolonial reframing of curriculum in this regard would not only mean using poetry as didactics but also using poetry to challenge “rational” vehicles of knowledge. In this process, the word is unveiled as political and as a social construction. The specificity of the social conditions of a certain time period is what gives meaning to narrative as a way of knowing. As H. L. Goodall describes, narratives “create alternative pathways to meaning” (2008: 14), which are guided by narrative rationality and not only by propositional thinking. This represents an epistemological and meta-epistemological process given that “it [narrative] alters the way we think about what we know and how we know it” (Goodall, 2008: 14). Neruda’s Canto General is not only a historical poem about the Americas but also a narrative inquiry; Neruda’s poetry is a method of research. Since narratives use metaphors to apprehend social phenomena, metaphors are “central vehicles for revealing qualitative aspects of life” (Eisner, 1991: 227). In this way, metaphor is central to life and language, and even to knowledge. As George Lakoff points out, because “our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, that we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (1980: 4).

As Neruda’s work is from 1950, it is possible to find in it some Eurocentric elements. Nevertheless, the most outstanding aspect of this work is that it problematizes the history of the Americas using poetry as a method and way of knowing. As David Le Bretón (2002) explains, in Western philosophy the epistemological division between humans and nature established a dominant relationship by means of a new discourse: objectivity. The world became anti-axiological. Human beings became alienated from themselves; in other words, modernity and its intrinsic coloniality created human beings as broken beings. Poetry exposes and heals this broken relationship and this ontological alienation.

Canto General is divided into 25 sections. Its structure as a large historical poem enables educators to address the colonial construction of knowledge of the Americas from 1492 to the latter half of the 20th century in an effective way. Thus, the sections “The Conquistadors” and “The Liberators” interrogate the colonial history from which knowledge has been created in America. For instance, instructors might problematize “Columbus Day” through considering the arrival of Christopher Columbus as the first epistemological act in America by means of which knowledge was built on oppression.

The butchers razed the islands.

Guanahaní was first

in this story of martyrdom.

The children of clay saw their smile

Shattered, beaten

Their fragile stature of deer,

And even in death they did not understand.

They were bound and tortured,

Burned and branded,

Bitten and buried. (Neruda, 1991 [1950]: 43)

Pedagogically speaking, Canto General challenges coloniality in ontological terms (challenging what counts as history) and in epistemological terms (using narratives as ways of knowing). Students can grasp the advent of colonialism as an epistemological event through the poem’s metaphors: “The children of clay saw their smile/Shattered, beaten.” When an educator starts from these lines, he or she is using narrative as a vehicle of knowledge, and is enabling students to disrupt dominant vehicles of knowledge. Narratives and metaphors, as non-rational forms of knowledge, challenge Western dialectics from an analectical standpoint and interrogate the Western method’s exclusive reliance on rationalistic ways of knowing. The Western connection between ego cogito and ego conquiro (see Dussel, 2007) can be unveiled by means of metaphors and the links can be exposed between European invasions and European philosophy.

For Dussel (1990), the concept of analogy is central to analectics. He explains how Heidegger revisited the traditional idea of the Greek lógos to uncover notions such as expressing and defining ideas. Beyond this, however, Dussel points out that the Greek lógos is a translation of the Hebrew dabar, which means to tell, to discuss, to disclose, and so on. Whereas lógos represents single-mindedness and linearity, and speaks in an unequivocal manner, the concept of dabar begins from ana-logos. That is, it folds outward in order to listen to the revelation of the Other. When a teacher uses the metaphors in Neruda's poem to show the terrors of genocide against indigenous peoples, this teacher is challenging the totality of European being as the totality. At the same time, he or she is taking into account an ana-totality (beyond the West) by using an ana-method (metaphor).

Galeano’s Memorias del Fuego

In Memorias del Fuego (1985), Eduardo Galeano rewrites the history of the continent named “America” in little tales. He reveals the voices that have been silenced from 1492 to the present day. Here we consider the extent to which Galeano is building a decolonial curriculum.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains that “Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators. The inherent ambivalence of the word ‘history’ in many modern languages, including English, suggests this dual participation” (1995: 2). Roberto González Echevarría (2011) argues that history is a metafiction. According to him, archives are fictional narratives as they are embedded in power and contradictions. Likewise, Martin Lienhard (1989) explains the crucial role of writing in the conquest of the new territories of the Americas. In order to conquer these territories, on the day Columbus arrived in America he called a priest and a notary before taking up arms; the notary here represents the official use of the word and the formation of archives. Further, this act of official writing—the legal narrative of the possession of America by the notary of Columbus—can be considered the first fictional novel. Nevertheless, historians use colonial archives to ground their scientific affirmations, which is especially problematic in relation to the colonial history of the Americas.

Galeano’s Memorias del Fuego challenges a huge range of historical sources through its use of narratives as a way of knowing. Galeano constructs short tales to evoke the silences of many centuries of colonialism and coloniality in America. Building from these tales, educators might invite students to interrogate familiar histories. For instance, the following account from Galeano might be used to highlight the relationship between slavery, the nascent capitalism of America, and the creation of knowledge:

1564

Plymouth

Hawkins

The four ships, under command of Captain John Hawkins, await the morning tide. As soon as the water rises they will sail for Africa, to hunt people on the coasts of Guinea. From there they will head for the Antilles to trade slaves for sugar, hides, and pearls.

A couple of years ago, Hawkins made this voyage on his own. In a ship named Jesus, he sold three hundred slaves as contraband in Santo Domingo. Queen Elizabeth exploded with fury when she learned of it, but her anger vanished as soon as she saw the balance sheet of the voyage. In no time at all she made herself a business partner of the audacious Devonshire “seadog”, and the Earls of Pembroke and Leicester and London’s lord mayor bought first shares in the new enterprise.

As the sailors hoist the sails, Captain Hawkins harangues them from the bridge. The British navy will make his orders its own in centuries to come: “Serve God every day!” Hawkins orders at the top of this lungs. “Love one another! Save your provisions! Watch out for fire! Keep good company!” (127, 187 and 198). (Galeano, 1985: 138–139)

The numbers that appear at the bottom of each short tale are indicators of the historical sources that Galeano used when writing it. Student readers might follow these references back to their primary sources to explore how these sources have been refashioned by historians and then by Galeano. (In this case, the numbers indicate the following sources: 127: Mannix and Cowley, Historia de la trata de negros; 187: Real, El corsario Drake y el imperio español; and 198: Rowse, The England of Elizabeth.)

Teachers might also use the short account above to show how Africans were not slaves but rather were made slaves as part of the process of imposing a Western cultural and epistemological totality over other totalities (in this case the African totality). As a result of this process, only one perspective was empowered as the totality (the European one). Educators might use the first paragraph from Galeano’s tale above to address the role of slavery in capitalism.

From this starting point, students might explore how African peoples were not part of the totality of Europe as subjects in the construction of the nascent capitalism; African peoples were only understood as the objects of the European totality and as an appendix of the European discourse of progress.

The epistemological racism of Western intellectual culture did not allow it to realize that there were intellectuals within the conquered territories. Our goal is to break the totality of the Western dialectics that was built without the participation of oppressed peoples. This process entails demystifying the metanarrative of the European totality as a historical discourse, which in turn leads us to question the meaning of history and the meaning of knowledge. Galeano’s Memorias del Fuego represents a useful starting point from which teachers can unveil the construction of authoritative forms of knowledge as part of a broader historical process.

Trouillot (1995) explains that theorists of history have followed two incompatible tendencies: 1) positivism, which makes the distinction between the “real” historical world and what people say about it; and 2) constructivism, in which the historical process and narratives about history overlap. Trouillot describes this dichotomy in the following way:

Thus, between the mechanically “realist” and naively “constructivist” extremes, there is the more serious task of determining not what history is—a hopeless goal if phrased in essentialist terms—but how history works. For what history is changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the processes and conditions of production of such narratives. (Trouillot, 1995: 25)

Galeano himself engages in the production of specific historical narratives, and in doing so he unveils the conditions of production of narratives of history more generally. His writing is a crucial entry point for students into a fundamental exploration and interrogation of the coloniality of knowledge.

Josías López Gómez’s Sakubel k'inal jachwinik

Another important element of the insurgent curriculum we outline here is indígena (indigenous) literature that has problematized Western epistemology. A distinction is relevant here. Indígena literature is written by indigenous authors, whereas indigenista literature is written by mestizos, non-indigenous people who ostensibly speak for the “voiceless” (indigenous peoples). The latter literature remains caught in a colonial paternalism in suggesting that indigenous peoples do not have a voice and are defenseless, especially in epistemological terms (Mariátegui (2007 [1928]). Armando Muyolema (2001) has explained the way in which indígena literature challenges the Western imposition of indigenista literature, because in the former indigenous persons speak for themselves and do not need interlocutors. For instance, the novel Canek (1979 [1940]) was written by Ermilo Abreu Gómez, a mestizo in the Mayan territory, whereas Sakubel k'inal jachwinik—La aurora lacandona (2005) was written by Josías López Gómez, an indigenous teacher in the Mayan communities. Even though both books present themselves as portraying the Mayan worldview, only the latter represents an indigenous perspective based in the experience of indigenous peoples.

In Canek, Abreu Gómez (1979 [1940]) revisits the story of the Mayan hero, Jacinto Uc de los Santos, better known as Canek, who was born in 1730 and brutally murdered in 1761 by the Spanish colonial order:

Canek said: –The future of this land depends on the union of that which is sleeping in our hands and that which is awake in theirs. Look at this child [Guy, the mestizo child]: he has Indian blood and a Spanish face. Look at him carefully: notice that he speaks Maya and writes Spanish. In him live the voices that are spoken and the words that are written. He is neither of the earth nor of the wind. In him, reason and feeling are braided together. (Abreu Gómez, 1979 [1940]: 37)

What is problematic is the philosophical investment in mestizaje in the above excerpt—that is, the assimilation of indigenous peoples into the mestizo population. Additionally, it is possible to see here an epistemological underestimation of indigenous peoples. Orality and voices are conveyed by the indigenous side of the child, Guy, whereas writing and reason are expressed by the Spanish side of Guy. There is an implicit offense here in not recognizing the Other as an epistemological subject. Even when indigenista literature tries to work for the interests of the Other (indigenous peoples), its perspective does not open the totality of Western thought. It does not confront the face of the Other (the ethical dimension of knowledge), which is an ana-logos (an alternative knowledge and alternative vehicle for the creation of knowledge), as Dussel (1990) describes. Indígena literature portrays indigenous stories in ontological and analogical terms because it goes beyond an anecdotal characterization of indigenous peoples, whereas the ontic perspective of the indigenista framework only takes the stories of indigenous peoples as entities that exist as an appendix of the “real” or “serious” metanarrative of the West. The analectic method means disrupting the ontic study of the oppressed peoples of the world.

A great example of this effort is the book Sakubel k'inal jachwinik—La aurora lacandona by Josías López Gómez. This is a social history book about Maya daily life and traditions. In this book, López Gómez portrays the desynchronization (Sanjinés, 2009) of the Maya peoples. In his stories, López Gómez shows how the unidimensionality of time is part of the Western and capitalist cosmovision (worldview), whereas for Mayan cultures time is multidimensional. These cultures construct knowledge in multidimensional ways; therefore, their perspective has a capacity that is missing from the Western worldview. In this manner, Sakubel k'inal jachwinik describes the way in which indigenous peoples not only build knowledge but also construct anchors of sense between themselves and the world.

In the story “No estás muerto” (“You are not dead”), Bake Chambor, the lead character, thinks in multidimensional ways that enable him to rebuild his life. In an interview, López Gómez explains that indigenous peoples from Chiapas are aware of the fact that reality is and at the same time is not. In this regard, similar contemporary notions such as “third space” are not in fact so new. Thus, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (2006) explains how Ch'ixi and Chhixi are part of the indigenous Aymara cosmology in Bolivia. Ch'ixi denotes something that is not entirely the result of a mix of two elements but rather contains both elements in itself. It is not a “third space” but “a third included.” The Ch'ixi category is used to explain how the indigenous world in Bolivia is conjugated with the Western world, while not being part of the latter and not mixing with it. Likewise, indigenous knowledge lives with its opposite without mixing with it. By contrast, Chhixi expresses mixture, a mish-mash characterized by a loss of energy. Rivera Cusicanqui proposes to revive Ch'ixi as a category to try to understand reality in a non-unidirectional way. Similarly, López Gómez points out in Sakubel k'inal jachwinik—La aurora lacandona that the Cartesian division of the world is flat and one-dimensional, whereas reality is in fact more complex.

Educators can use texts from indigenista literature (Canek, for instance) and from indígena literature (Sakubel k'inal jachwinik, for instance) to problematize how even progressive proposals from the West can be part of epistemological domination. We suggest that instructors can use this line of analysis as a guide for literature courses and that they can ask students to undertake the intellectual exercise of discerning elements of Ch'ixi or Chhixi in texts that they are reading. Through these exercises, the Eurocentric epistemological underpinnings of readings of history and culture can begin to be disrupted in the curriculum.

Conclusion

Europe is not the center of the world anymore, but it still claims to be the center of knowledge in education. Even when scholars develop “new” educational research, the latter is not really new to the extent that it is often built from familiar European concepts of the 16th century. Likewise, schools and universities around the world aim to teach students critical thinking skills. These students develop their research from the curricula of their courses, which contain articles and reference lists that generally only point to applied studies of the same Eurocentric concepts. Therefore, students tend to recycle the same European framework for knowledge. By contrast, we have proposed a decolonial curriculum using a decolonial method. The analectic method of the Latin American philosopher Dussel (1985) has led us to start from alternative channels of knowledge (narratives and poetry) to listen to stories of the Other. We have tried to open dialectics to the oppressed, taking into account stories and poetry as vehicles of knowledge of the peoples of Latin America (Romo Torres, 2016).

In this study we have proposed an epistemically insurgent curriculum for students of history and literature. This curriculum contains a silenced corpus of knowledge from the Americas as a whole continent, from which can emerge concepts that can challenge European theories in the field of education. We have revisited some aspects of the history of the Americas to rescue the epistemological memory of non-Western ways of knowing. Literature is an important mode in which to recover these other conceptual frameworks. Thus, we have described how the texts examined in this study can be taken up as pedagogical tools to construct a decolonial approach to the whole continent. Educators can use these pieces as guidelines and as core materials for epistemic resistance on the field of curriculum: incorporating silenced voices from throughout the Americas/Abya Yala will enable students to build original thinking rather than simply reproducing familiar projects and categories.

A decolonial curriculum can be a significant tool in helping the field of education to demonstrate transcolonial possibilities (Fregoso Bailón, 2015) and to recover its intellectual and political mission. Problematizing underlying Eurocentric epistemological assumptions in the curriculum through fields such as history and literature represents an urgent and innovative way to move education forward and to hold it to a critical commitment. We acknowledge that much more needs to be done to achieve an epistemically insurgent curriculum because there are many voices to be included. This study is only a part of this larger project. What we propose here aims to clarify and further this work, and to open the space for diverse interventions that start from a range of geopolitical, curricular, and cultural locations.