Recontextualising race,politics and inequality in transnational knowledge circulation: Biographical resignifications

Abstract

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the resignification of globally circulating texts in terms of their entextualisation and reflect on my own role in this process through an auto-ethnographic narrative. I focus on two widely circulating texts that explicitly deal with questions of social power and globalisation: ‘On the cunning of imperialist reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) and ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies’ (The New London Group, 1996). Examination of their re-entextualisation in Brazil points to the need to bring to bear additional epistemological resources attuned to social and political struggles in order to address the racial inequalities that have come to be at the forefront of my own scholarly concerns. The article concludes by suggesting ways of engaging with globally circulating knowledge through the incorporation of knowledge produced by local struggles and emerging from everyday categories, giving the example of possible uses of the Brazilian concept of gambiarra.

Introduction

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised theorisations of inequality as they circulate globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing the geopolitics of knowledge, which favours theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). My focus is on the category of ‘race’, central to the organisation of capitalist and neo-colonial social relations in the global south, and indeed to the relationship of exploitation and expropriation historically established between the global north and global south. The dichotomy of north and south points to the ways in which the spaces of contemporary globalisation and knowledge exchange bear the historical marks of colonialism and are marked by the categorical divisions of coloniality, particularly racial divides (Grosfoguel, 2007; Said, 1995). These spaces are not completely separated, and it is most productive to think of the tensions of north and south, or centre and periphery, as being overlayed and intersecting in any given territory or space of knowledge production and circulation.

One strategy advocated by decolonial thinkers is to abandon theories produced in the global north and develop an alternative theoretical repertoire drawn from vernacular concepts and intellectual traditions, particularly those grounded in the insights emerging from subaltern perspectives and social struggles (Appadurai, 2000; Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2012). However, I argue that there is merit in constructive engagement with socially critical theorisations across contexts by adopting an active stance in processes of resignification. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, I consider such processes in terms of entextualisation, ‘the process by means of which discourse is successively decontextualised and recontextualised, and thus made into a “new” discourse’ (Blommaert, 2005). A focus on processes of entextualisation allows for examination of roles involved in the production, circulation and reception of a given text, as well as the shifts in meaning that occur when these roles or other contextual elements alter in subsequent appropriations of the text (Silverstein and Urban, 1996).

This perspective identifies meaning as produced locally and indexically through the relationships established between texts, co-texts (intertextual relationships) and contexts. Rather than understanding meaning as a denotational and stable textual quality, the indexical quality of language refers to meaning produced by references to culturally and situationally shaped social identities and discursive orders that, in face-to-face interactions, are part of the pragmatic knowledge shared by interlocutors (Silverstein, 2009). When indexical orders are not shared due to social, temporal and spatial distance between the original productive context of a text and its reception, new and divergent meanings are produced, as Said (1983) captured in his analysis of ‘travelling theory’.

The two texts I focus on are ‘On the cunning of imperialist reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) and ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies’ (The New London Group, 1996). Both texts have circulated widely and explicitly deal with questions of social power and globalisation. I position myself as a subject involved in the entextualisation of these texts, which have influenced my outlook on theory and theoretical knowledge production. Although I have not played a central role in this process, the circulation of such texts is due, in part, to the transnational mobility of institutionalised scholars such as myself. I was educated in Australia and France and now live and work in Brazil. An important biographical element informing my work as an ‘entextualiser’ has been contact with the texts under examination in two contexts that I see as distinctive in important ways. I have been able to compare the relationship between text and productive context with that between text and a more distant receptive context. As a White scholar working in the global south, in a context of deep and visible structural racism, and as a participant alongside Black and White students and teachers in social and intellectual movements that seek to challenge this racism, I am interested in what theoretical resources can contribute to this challenge.

This is not to say that racism does not structure social relations in the productive contexts of Australia or in France, but rather that my own professional and personal journey, and the particular moment of ‘democratisation’ in Brazilian education, has contributed to a sharpening of my attention to this issue. I began working as a tenured professor in Brazil at a university that tripled in size over the course of a decade and altered its student profile from almost entirely White and middle class in most courses, to having a majority of Black and working-class students, a phenomenon repeated nationally. I was hired in the midst of this democratising process, through the Federal University Restructuring and Expansion Plan (REUNI), a policy launched in 2007 by the centre-left Workers Party government (2003–2016).

As the preceding paragraphs already hint, I am adopting here a methodological strategy of auto-ethnographic narrative (Ellis et al., 2011; Méndez, 2013). Autoethnography has proved to be a valuable way of making visible the locus of enunciation of scholars whose investments inside and outside of the academic field are built up over time through lived experiences. Much of what influences scholarly decision-making about epistemology, theory and method sits outside of written research papers and often goes unexamined. The failure of scholars to acknowledge a socially, politically and racially situated locus of enunciation contributes to the coloniality of knowledge (Grosfoguel, 2007). Transnational mobility adds a layer of complexity to this locus, as multiple histories and spaces of belonging come into contact and further shape scholarly priorities and perceptions in energising and sometimes troubling ways (Phan, 2011; Phan and Mohamad, 2020).

The over-extension of imperialist reason

French intellectual Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world’s most widely read social theorists, famous for his analysis of social power in the fields of culture and education (Bourdieu, 1973, 1984). I encountered his work on cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993) as an honours student of English and French at the University of Melbourne, Australia, resulting in my first academic publication (Windle, 2005). At the same institution, I was later supervised by Richard Teese, a translator and proponent of Bourdieu’s work on educational inequalities, and by Marie Duru Bellat, a French collaborator of Teese, at the University of Bourgogne, in France. This south-north mobility was in keeping with a long tradition of Australian scholars undertaking post-graduate study in Europe and the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in light of the concentration of institutionalised knowledge production in these two poles, it is the entextualisation of Bourdieu’s framework in the United States, rather than in the global south, that has attracted greatest attention (Weininger and Lareau, 2003). And it is the intellectual relationship between Europe and the United States that prompted Bourdieu and his former student, Loïc Wacquant, a professor at the University of California, to globalise Bourdieu’s theorisation of the French intellectual field.

Bourdieu’s account of French academic life pays attention to distinctive forms of prestige, recognition and power that constitute the stakes of the academic field, while also noting that some agents and disciplines are more heavily influenced by the stakes emanating from other fields, notably the economic field (Bourdieu, 1988). Within a vision of relatively autonomous social fields in which different stakes or forms of capital pertain, Bourdieu’s framework allowed for the influence of one field over another, and indeed Bourdieu grew increasingly concerned about the advance of economic logics into other fields, in the form of neoliberalism (Bourdieu, 2002). Around the same time, he developed a concern for the global dominance of US academic models that presupposed ‘cultural universality’. Bourdieu’s perspective on both neoliberalism and US cultural imperialism are captured in/by the idea of ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer, 1992), referring to the export of homogenised and pre-packaged products (whether commercial or intellectual) from the United States to the rest of the world. Hence, Bourdieu came to defend those fields that he saw as more independent of ‘imported’ logics. While Bourdieu showed awareness of his own position of power within the French intellectual field and interest in his reception in the United States, he believed that his own approach to sociology was cordoned off from outside discursive influences and in direct dialogue with situated social realities (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).

It is fair to say that most of my academic production is aligned with Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, and as such, when I began working in São Paulo, South America’s largest metropolis, I quickly established friendships and working relationships with Bourdieusian scholars and translators, many of whom shared with me the experience of post-graduate study in France and personal connections with Bourdieu’s circle. These scholars perform the role of entextualising Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions, often through empirical studies that mobilise categories such as cultural capital and seek to identify them with a new set of cultural practices, social divisions and institutional arrangements (Almeida, 2007; Brandão and Martinez, 2006; Setton, 2005). Entextualised into Brazilian sociology departments and faculties of education, some of Bourdieu’s theories, such as the distinction between cultural and economic elites, have ‘travelled’ well and local findings have been taken up with interest in ‘northern’ journals (Windle and Nogueira, 2015). Nonetheless, ‘race’ appeared to me to be a notable blind-spot in a setting where social class divisions have long been mapped onto racial distinctions, reflected in occupational hierarchies and educational outcomes (Do Valle Silva and Hasenbalg, 2000; Hasenbalg et al., 1999).

For this reason, I was extremely interested to discover the short text ‘On the cunning of imperialist reason’ at the start of a Portuguese translation of Bourdieu’s writings on education (Nogueira and Catani, 1998). My interest also came from my involvement in teacher–education projects in public schools in which most students were Black and most teachers were White, in partnership with the Black scholar and activist Kassandra Muniz, coordinator of the Centre for Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Studies at the Federal University of Ouro Preto. This work included producing curricula that integrated foreign language education with Afro-centric texts (Windle and Muniz, 2018, 2020). Our working context was of the rapid expansion of education to include formerly excluded groups, and as such involved some similar tensions to those emerging from rapidly rising retention rates in 1960s France, the period of ‘democratisation’ and the crumbling of the cultural alignment of pedagogical structures, and the tiny elite of students who successfully passed through them (Bourdieu and Champagne, 1992; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979).

The 1998 translation of Bourdieu’s writings on education into Portuguese provides valuable insights into the dynamics of knowledge circulation. Edited by French-educated Brazilian academics, the book shows recognition of the need for recontextualisation by providing appendices that map French educational institutions and grade levels onto Brazilian equivalents. Rather than provide a preface for the assembled chapters, originally published in French academic journals, Nogueira and Catani (1998) sent the editors ‘On the cunning of imperialist reason’ (‘imperialist reason’, here on), which is not about education at all. The text appeared in the same year in French in a journal edited by Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1998), and in an English translation in a US journal the following year. This quick-fire global circulation was matched by the swift publication and circulation of negative responses (French, 2000; Hanchard, 2002), including through translations in Brazilian journals (French, 2002).

The apparent justification for Bourdieu’s choice of this text as a preface for Brazilian readers is that it serves as a warning for scholars in the global south to pay close attention to the specificities of their own societies, rather than blindly accepting models from settings that have incommensurable histories and social structures. The text’s central example is the ‘imposition’ of US categories of race in studies of Brazil, whether by US scholars or Latin Americans influenced by purported US cultural imperialism. In short, while the United States is purported to have a dichotomous racial classification (Black and White), Brazil is held to have racial ‘continuum’ characterised by racial mixing and racial democracy. The authors focus their fire on Michael Hanchard’s critique of Brazilian racial ideologies:

[m]ost of the recent research on ethnoracial inequality in Brazil strives to prove that, contrary to the image that Brazilians have of their own nation, the country of the ‘three sad races’ . . . is no less ‘racist’ than others and that Brazilian ‘whites’ have nothing to envy their North American cousins on this score. Worse yet, Brazilian racism mascarado should by definition be regarded as more perverse precisely on account of being dissimulated and denigrated. This is the claim of Afro-American political scientist Michael Hanchard. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999)

I was shocked by ‘imperialist reason’ for reasons that are similar to those outlined in US and Brazilian responses (the text was largely ignored in France). Bourdieu and Wacquant relied on outdated scholarship grounded in romantic nationalism and showed no understanding of the contemporary politics of the Brazilian Black rights movement (Bortoluci et al., 2015; Costa, 2002; French, 2000; Hanchard, 2002; Ortiz, 2013; Telles, 2003). Bourdieu and Wacquant’s work was entextualised in Brazil at a high-point in the political struggle for affirmative-action entry programmes for Black students at universities, in which the arguments they made aligned with the position of conservatives opposed to affirmative action, such as Azevedo (2004).

Bourdieu and Wacquant cite no Brazilian scholar involved in the political debates over racial categories occurring in Brazil at the time they wrote, and Wacquant declined to participate in a special edition of the Brazilian journal Estudos afro-asiáticos, in 2002, dedicated to their work (Bourdieu’s death prevented his involvement). In this special edition, leading Brazilian scholars, such as Costa (2002), argued that the circulation of ideas around race within the African diaspora, including the United States and Brazil, could in no way be construed as the ‘imperialism’ that Bourdieu and Wacquant saw, based primarily on their reading of Hanchard. It is noteworthy that Costa’s more considered piece has had a far greater impact in Brazil than Bourdieu and Wacquant’s original piece, which even defenders of Bourdieu in Brazil view as ‘strange’ (Bortoluci et al., 2015).

What is striking about Bourdieu and Wacquant’s work is the stunning misapplication of the category of imperialism that had worked well for analysing the spread of neoliberalism in Europe, to a context in which they were unable to situate themselves socially or politically. This is in contrast to Bourdieu’s active political engagements against neoliberalism in France in the 1990s, and in the field of progressive politics more generally; and Wacquant’s anti-racist political engagements in the United States focused on incarceration. In the productive context of political reaction over the course of the 1990s in Europe and the United States, it made sense to seek to carve scholarship off from dominant political influences. However, the context of Brazil in the same decade was of re-democratisation and the rise of progressive politics in which Black empowerment played an important role, something that Hanchard, the object of Bourdieu and Wacquant’s harshest criticism, experienced first-hand working at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s. For progressive anti-racist scholars at that time, and subsequently, the introduction of affirmative action policies in the 2000s at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and in the 2010s in all Brazilian public universities, based on the allegedly US-imperialist model of race (per Bourdieu and Wacquant), was one of our greatest victories – and I count myself in this group. The proportion of Black youth attending university doubled in the decade from 2005 to 2015 (Vieira, 2016). The number of Brazilians identifying as Black has also increased in the wake of the Black Rights movement, to now constitute a majority of the Brazilian population. The fruits of political struggle are reflected in laws mandating Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture be taught in schools, and in intellectual production on the importance of race in classroom dynamics (De Melo, 2015).

What I conclude from this encounter is that Bourdieu’s writings on France are more useful for Brazilian scholars than his brief attempt to write directly about Brazil because they include a more astute analysis of socio-political context and flows. For me, this reinforces the relevance of political struggle as part of the epistemological foundation of social research and one that helps to entextualise ‘travelling’ texts as part of ethical positions in favour of oppressed and marginalised groups. Examples of this can be found in exchanges between Black feminist intellectuals such as Angela Davis and Lélia Gonzalez (Santo Viana, 2010), who demonstrate the political potential of the transnational circulation of types of knowledge that are generated through engagement in social struggles, a point emphasised by Connell (2007). Another noteworthy example of politically powerful appropriations includes the travelling of Paulo Freire’s work to the United States, and its return to Brazil, recontextualised through the intersectional feminism of bell hooks, and now part of progressive, anti-racist education movements here.

It is necessary, therefore, to contextualise claims about racial categorisations within the multi-scalar social and political settings from which they emerge and with regard for who is making these claims. For me, much of this contextualisation has come through research collaborations with scholars who have taught me about the role of transnational mobility in informing local political activism (from Brazilian scholars who studied in US universities with traditions of activism, for example). It has also come through contact with Brazilian students in schools, universities and community projects, as well as sharp experiences of racial double standards (Windle, 2017b), all of which have resulted in major shifts in my thinking and academic production. Such self-recontextualisation can be thought of as a mode of ‘grounding the transnational’ resulting from the dialects of displacement and emplacement, as Phùng (this volume) suggests.

Multiliteracies beyond design

The ‘Pedagogy of multiliteracies’ (The New London Group, 1996) is more open than Bourdieu and Wacquant about the positions from which the authors seek to entextualise a jointly theorised utopian proposal for ‘designing social futures’. The ten authors provide a meta-narrative of how they came together as a transnational and interdisciplinary network of scholars based in Australia and the United States, and the moment of entextualisation is located in a meeting in the US city of New London in 1994, at the height of the Clinton/Blair third-way optimism. The authors note that ‘creating a context for the meeting were our differences of national experience and differences of theoretical and political emphasis’ (The New London Group, 1996: 62). Hence, unlike Bourdieu and Wacquant, anxious to maintain boundaries between ‘science’ and other forms of knowledge, the multiliteracies authors aligned scholarly production with progressive political intervention and with negotiations among multiple perspectives and positionalities. Some, such as Bill Cope and Allan Luke, had played, or would go on to play, important professional roles in political and policy arenas. Subsequent work on multiliteracies has retained the original formulation and contextual narrative, particularly as carried forward by Cope and Kalantzis (2009).

The authors set out to programmatically outline ‘a theoretical overview of the current social context of learning and the consequences of social changes for the content (the “what”) and the form (the “how”) of literacy pedagogy’ (The New London Group, 1996). Whereas Bourdieu and Wacquant operate on national scales, The New London Group constructs a view of a networked global society characterised by convergence and demanding adaptation to ‘extend the idea and scope of literacy pedagogy to account for the context of our culturally and linguistically diverse and increasingly globalised societies, for the multifarious cultures that interrelate and the plurality of texts that circulate’ (The New London Group, 1996: 61). Here, ‘local diversity and global connectedness’ (The New London Group, 1996: 61) go hand in hand to constitute the ‘critical factors’ of a single context.

I feel a strong sense of familiarity with the world indexed in ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’, including through terms such as multiculturalism, through shared experiences of the productive context of urban educational environments with large numbers of migrant-background students in economically developed English-speaking nations experiencing the influence of neoliberalism. I remember attending a lecture by Mary Kalantzis, one of the authors of the text, as a student of education at the University of Melbourne in 2002, and I shared an office with a teacher from an inner-city bilingual primary school, Paul Molyneux, who introduced me to the growing academic production on multiliteracies.

At the University of São Paulo a decade later, I began to work within a network of scholars who were drawing on the multiliteracies framework and came into contact with Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, who visited Brazil for numerous academic events, as well as hosting Brazilian post-graduate students at the University of Illinois. I began to use their work and Brazilian adaptations (Rojo, 2012), in my teaching and post-graduate supervision, and also examined theses grounded in multiliteracies. In a different decade and a different continent from the original entextualisation, I began to feel uneasy about how well the theory had travelled, and whether the society and social changes referred to in ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ might be different in important ways from the Brazilian context.

Despite relative silence on race, ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ moves beyond the strictly ‘localist’ vs ‘imperialist’ dynamic by arguing that a weakening of ‘singular national cultures’ opens up a productive and creative space for multiple identifications and movement between these, including ‘gender, ethnicity, generation, and sexual orientation’ (The New London Group, 1996: 70). These spaces, termed ‘lifeworlds’, but which could also be thought of in terms of social fields, are challenged by the ‘increasing invasion of private spaces by mass media culture, global commodity culture, and communications and information networks’ (The New London Group, 1996: 70). This invasion is capable of eliciting critical responses and some of the same globalised communicative channels also contribute to the vibrancy of ‘subcultural’ communities.

This creativity, as outlined by the authors, allows for the local and situated incorporation of outside framings for emancipatory purposes, through the appropriation and recreation of discourses and social identities – a process that appears to be relevant for some of the strategies of Brazil’s Black Rights movement and is indeed presented with examples from the US Civil Rights Movement:

[h]ow can one be a ‘real’ lawyer and, at the same time, have one’s performance influenced by being an African American? In his arguments before the US Supreme Court for desegregating schools, Thurgood Marshall did this in a classic way. And, in mixing the discourse of politics with the discourse of African American religion, Jesse Jackson has transformed the former. The key here is juxtaposition, integration, and living with tension. (The New London Group, 1996: 87)

I found the idea of semiotic boundary-crossing, hybridity and instability useful, particularly for examining online communities and practices (Windle and Ferreira, 2019); however, there appears to be a flattening out of time and space in the strong version of globalisation underpinning this vision of fluidity and convergence. Turns of phrase used in the text, such as ‘our society’ or ‘the new environment of literacy education’ are repeated in Brazilian entextualisations of multiliteracies, even though these terms index quite different contexts. The environment of literacy education in rural Brazil, for example, frequently comprises a classroom without computers, textbooks, or even electricity.

Some entextualisations of multiliteracies, such as in the work of Indigenous scholar Martin Nakata (2005), devote much effort to establishing a distinctive historical narrative and standpoint; however, many other re-entextualisations retain the justifications embedded in the 1996 New London Group narrative of new global times. My concerns are basically around indexical slippages that occur in the shift from the ‘global society’ of ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ to other contexts when the narrative is unchanged. The narrative slippages can be summarised as follows in relation to Brazilian appropriations:

• a) The connections between school and work are based on the rise of new types of post-Fordist work and neoliberal economics in ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’, but the majority of Brazil’s workers have always been outside of formal employment and the past decade has seen growth in the welfare state.

• b) The historical narrative in ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ is based on the historical importance of the Second World War and post-war boom; however, in Latin America other conflicts and economic cycles have been of greater relevance (Mignolo, 2003).

• c) New technologies are presented in ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ as resulting in the collapse of mass audiences, but Brazil has a near media monopoly by the Globo network that heavily influences political and economic relations.

• d) The account of diversity in ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ is largely framed in terms of cultural and linguistic differences and communities that are becoming ‘less clearly bounded’. (The New London Group, 1996: 71)

However, as signalled previously, in Brazil race is perhaps the strongest and most visible structural division, and this is the product of a history of enslavement and long-term struggles that are largely beyond the spatio-historical horizon of ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’.

The key task for scholars like myself, who seek to contribute to a more nuanced and productive entextualisation that does not rely on this originating narrative, is to rework and resignify ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’, and not just through more sensitive applications but through the production of theory. ‘Design’ is at the centre of the multiliteracies framework and is one theoretical element that I have sought to problematise and expand upon. This metaphor is used to index semiotic conventions and pedagogical strategies, as well as the ways in which both can structure new textual forms that influence social futures and rearrange existing relations or institutions. Importantly, design refers to both pre-existing structures and to the actions that can be taken to alter these (processes of redesigning). Design, as used metaphorically by The New London Group, also implies careful planning, enabled by stable resources, predictable timeframes and reliable materials. These are not the conditions under which much Brazilian construction is undertaken, to take the metaphor back to a literal scale, something that was hit home to me as I helped out in family building projects in regional Australia and in a Brazilian urban periphery.

In Brazil, the term gambiarra is used to refer to the improvised and unofficial solutions that step into the gaps left by official designs and their execution. These involve salvaged materials, adaptations and creativity, and are often precarious or temporary solutions to pressing problems. While there is a danger of romanticising and naturalising everyday concepts when picked up as theoretical lenses, I have found value in using the concept of gambiarra to locally rethink ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’. Initially published in the Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics (Windle, 2017a), my use of this term was entextualised as potentially a travelling theory in the introduction to the edition in which it appeared, written by a well-known northern scholar, through comparison to similar concepts and theoretical resources in the global north:

The Brazilian tradition of gambiarra (like the French système D) is to creatively improvise solutions through tactics that, like guerrilla warfare, thrive on unpredictability. Gambiarra enables social actors to seize the moment and invent ways of acting in the interstices of power. As Michel de Certeau points out in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), whereas in predictable environments individuals with initiative and agency can develop goals and strategies and plan ahead, social actors who don’t have a ‘proper locus’ (p. 37) and are forced to live in precarious and unpredictable circumstances have to resort to tactics to survive. (Kramsch, 2017)

Entextualisation of this type is recursive and dialogical, and I have subsequently sought to elicit views from a class of post-graduate students on the potential contribution of the notion of gambiarra for resignifying ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’. Their discussions suggested that gambiarra could be usefully contrasted with design:

If you think about it, our institutions are very little concerned with design, right? Sometimes things are kind of given without a lot of organization and it is very creative people, who give a new use to things that turn out to be a real gambiarra . . . I think that happens with everything, right? . . . There is a computer in the room, but no Internet. Then there is no library. (Stela, secondary school Portuguese teacher) ¹

Here, Stela drew on her own teaching experiences to suggest that gambiarra emerges from a lack of planning and from uncertainties or incomplete designs (such as a computer but no internet). The term gambiarra was also used in student discussions to index the precarious conditions of teachers’ work:

Gambiarra, as an improvisation, helps us think about how teachers deal with the contradictions between public policies, curricula, resources, and student needs. Certainly, this notion emphasizes the precariousness that defines the conditions of teaching work in many contexts. This fact also made us reflect on the development of multiliteracies in such contexts. Thus, we can see that the use of gambiarra in multiliteracy practices in many educational contexts, in addition to highlighting the needs and challenges to be solved, it may reflect a position of accommodation in the face of these problems. (Flávia, secondary school English teacher)

This perspective presents a view of gambiarra as ‘accommodation’ rather than an active engagement with problems. However, at the same time, the concept involves complex responses to important conflicts. The idea of gambiarra as something hidden and shameful, albeit necessary, was also highlighted as a dimension of teachers’ work not reached by the concept of design:

The institution does admit it [gambiarra] and does not show you it, just as those who do it also try to show you what they did well, and not what is behind it. Sometimes it’s not a matter of being good or bad, because it’s not about judging if it’s good or bad, right? It is about showing how it works in practice . . . If you show it, the other person will already say that it is a gambiarra. Nobody says they made a gambiarra as if they had done a good thing. Everybody says, like, ‘Oh, I made a gambiarra here. It’s something I’ll fix later, which I’ll fix. No one can see it. No one is proud of it: ‘Ah, I made gambiarra. Look how beautiful!’ (laughs). (Stela)

Here, gambiarra has the quality of being deeply incorporated within institutional and individual practices but marked by absence or denial in discursive practices. The admission of gambiarra can only be ephemeral (‘I will fix it later’).

Certainly, the idea of gambiarra is not specific to Brazil, and could help to account for realities even in the productive contexts of ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’. Nevertheless, it also has the capacity of speaking to particular Brazilian realities and potentially others in the global south. Gambiarra indexes the relationship of peripheral populations to education, and particularly that of many poor and Black students whose school attendance is frequently disrupted by armed conflict between police, milicias and drug cartels. Lack of access to, or intermittent access to, educational opportunities generates situations of gambiarra where students attempt to regain or retain a precarious foothold on the curriculum.

Metaphorical extensions, such as the appropriation of gambiarra, involve a type of local knowledge production that moves between theory and daily life, often involving collective reflection and re-evaluation of ‘outside’ concepts. Recent scholarship grounded in the literacy practices used by favela residents to warn each other of gun-fights and other dangers, and to denounce state violence to the international media, has used the term ‘literacies of survival’ (Maia, 2017) to refer to precisely the type of improvised and reactive practice captured by gambiarra. Other Brazilian work has developed the concept of ‘literacies of re-existence’ to capture some of the vernacular and peripheral literacy practices used in hip-hop groups that resignify and celebrate Black diasporic identities (Souza, 2009), Traditions of Afro-Brazilian resistance, such as mandinga, a set of moves within the martial art of capoeira, have also been incorporated into language studies (Muniz, 2020). Hence, the literacy-as-social practice model that underpins ‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ has proved adaptable and productive for local theorising that contributes to the project of decolonial thought (Mignolo, 2012; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).

Conclusion

In this article I have analysed the transnational circulation of two theoretical texts that my own professional trajectory has led me to identify as examples of northern theory. Insights have been generated through reflections on the importance for meaning-making of indexical divergences between productive and receptive contexts. These contexts include both social structures and the processes of entextualisation. Entextualisation has been used here to refer to the work of embedding, situating and resignifying a text. It requires the labour of intellectual workers, such as myself, and as such it is important to reflect on how the role of entextualisation can be made visible and undertaken in ways that challenge the unequal global geopolitics of knowledge production. Here I have highlighted how my positionality as a White teacher–educator seeking to engage with classes made up of a majority of Black, working-class and first-generation university students from an anti-racist perspective has influenced my relationship to globally circulating knowledge.

In Brazil, the arrival of Black and peripheral bodies into formerly racially exclusive spaces has provoked a sharp backlash that draws on some of the schematic ideas of ‘outside’ interference that Bourdieu and Wacquant also promoted. For this reason, Bourdieu and Wacquant’s text on Brazilian race relations is, perhaps, an example of failed re-entextualisation in terms of retaining a socially critical edge. Bourdieu’s theoretical framework loses critical force when local political dynamics, such as the struggle for affirmative action in university admissions, are ignored. Bourdieu and Wacquant’s warning about the perils of US cultural imperialism is based on an example that neither author has any history of researching, from a context with which they have no familiarity. The text’s rapid publication and circulation in multiple languages attests to the symbolic capital of its authors, more than its analysis. In Brazil, the text has been used against affirmative action programmes that reserve university places for Black students (Azevedo, 2004). Some scholars, including myself (Windle, 2017b), have extended the concept of cultural capital to address racial privilege; however, such efforts do not draw on Bourdieu’s direct attempt to address Brazilian race relations in the text discussed previously.

‘The pedagogy of multiliteracies’ has a more complex point of origin. Connell (2007) locates Australia as part of the global south, due to its status as a former colony. Nevertheless, Australia is a ‘privileged’ periphery, as Connell also notes, and its academic field is tightly integrated with those of the United States and Europe. The meta-narrative of the meeting in 1994 in New London of Australian and US-based scholars attests to this tight connection, as does the publication of the text in the prestigious Harvard Educational Review. My reading of the multiliteracies framework is that it is addressed at well-resourced schools in multicultural global cities in developed nations, such as Melbourne, a city where I studied and worked as a teacher. The text projects an interconnected global society and requires active recontextualisation and adaptation to adequately take into account the segmented and unequal relationships historically shaping transnational relations and visible in structural racism.

Abandoning the notion of purely receptive context, I have suggested that through an active and theoretically productive entextualisation of ‘travelling theory’ (Said, 1983) that the ‘northernness’ of theory can be challenged, in keeping with moves suggested by decolonial thought (Mignolo, 2012; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). Rather than contaminating ‘scientific’ thought, as Bourdieu sometimes argued, knowledge forged in political activism and social struggles is central to the construction and theoretical mobilisation of contextually relevant and emancipatory epistemologies. Discussion in a post-graduate classroom of the vernacular concept of gambiarra shows one potentially productive pathway for rethinking and resignifying transnationally circulating texts as they are entextualised. Gambiarra, like other locally theorised concepts, has the potential to speak to local forms of improvisation in educational and peripheral spaces, but also to travel to other contexts, contributing to a more dynamic and democratic circulation of knowledge. At the same time, it has the potential to be used in contradictory ways to justify or naturalise problems. In this regard, as knowledge and concepts travel, their meanings must be re-evaluated and positioned in relation to contexts of knowledge production and use that are inherently political.

For this reason, a keen appreciation of locally defined political struggle appears to be an important epistemological vantage point for managing and interpreting the processes of entextualisation. ‘Organic’ intellectuals such as Paulo Freire and bell hooks provide valuable examples of this, and as their work has travelled it has often been taken up within political and social movements before reaching more traditional forms of academic knowledge production. Entextualising conditions change over time and space to produce new meanings (sometimes institutionalised and schematised, sometimes subversive). Transnationally mobile scholars face not only potential stimulus for revisions of their theoretical reference points from daily experiences and political struggles but also, as I have hinted at in relation to Bourdieu and Wacquant, moments of tension and disappointment. The intertwined transnational circulation of texts and scholars makes them susceptible to both overextending normative and referential frameworks, and to being reconfigured and appropriated in productive ways in dialogue with new social realities.