by Rosemere Ferreira Da Silva
In November 2018, Professor Jane Anna Gordon presented a public lecture and seminar at the State University of Bahia (UNEB) campus in Santo Antônio de Jesus, Brazil. The theme of her presentation was Creolizing Power, Theory, and Education.
Professor Gordon began by thanking Professor Rosemere Ferreira da Silva for organizing her visit to UNEB and for the opportunity to discuss her thought on the proposed topic there. She framed the discussion through the following questions: first, why tackle creolization? Second, how does a creolization of politics focus on the rationale of racial and community democracy? And last, what does it mean to create a discipline of education and critical pedagogy, especially in the classroom context?
To contextualize her response to these questions, Gordon spoke about her experiences as a researcher and, at the same time, her involvement with the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA), an organization founded in 2003 with the commitment of “Shifting the Geography of Reason.” She was president of the organization from 2013–2016.
One of the main objectives of the CPA is to support the free exchange of ideas of an intellectual community representative of the diversity of interdisciplinary voices and perspectives in the Caribbean and the Global South from the critique of modernity and all the problems faced by humanity that emerge, mainly, the relations of race, gender, domination, genocide, dependence, exploitation, liberty, emancipation and decolonization.
When the organization was founded, Professor Gordon explained, many philosophers working in the United States and other countries did not believe that researchers outside of North America and Europe could contribute, through their ideas, to philosophy. Some claimed that because of the apparent uniqueness of European cultures, philosophy was supposedly an enterprise that only developed in that region of the world.
When many such critics think of freedom and the tranquil life, the only references, they claim, are Europeans. Of course, some people refuted this form of thinking, but their ideas were rarely reflected in the philosophy curriculum of universities across the globe. In general, in order to study the philosophical ideas of non-European people, one would often have to do so through Black studies, history, literature, ethnomusicology, or religion, for example, but rarely through philosophy in the world of ideas.
The organizers of the CPA argued that people in Africa, the Caribbean, and South America—indigenous peoples and Africans, especially the women in these groups—have always produced forms of knowledge in response to the needs and situation of life to which they have always been exposed, and that the ideas these people produce have value. They add, however, that ideas are not produced and do not live in a vacuum. They need places in which they can be nurtured and where they can be seriously studied.
Professor Gordon recounted how she had realized this need firsthand when she first taught political theories of education. Unlike her early experiences of teaching introductory courses in political theory, she there observed the existence of many women thinkers because historically women have a deep relationship with the teaching profession. She realized that when she taught about these female theorists, many students wanted to know more and more about them. When she asked them why they wanted to learn more about those women, many of them confessed they were skeptical about women’s ability to produce such critical and political work about education. Here is an excerpt from her presentation, in which she discussed how this led to her work on creolization, the study of power, and her subsequent research in philosophy of education:
So I set up a course entirely focused on women thinkers who acted politically from the 1400s until the 1960s. When I proposed the course, [the curriculum committee] asked if there could be enough material for a semester. The fact of the matter is that I had an opposite problem. There were so many women thinkers to study that it was necessary to devise pedagogical strategies through which many, if not most, were discussed.
I must say that the same thing happens with black political thinking and that, therefore, the CPA, as a foundational organization dedicated to the study of the history and the present of a more complete world of ideas, offer support to the teachers and students who carry out this kind of work.
In my research, I was interested in broadening a concept that emerged to understand the Caribbean and to see if it could be useful to political theory in a more general way. Specifically, I chose the concept of creolization and began to investigate whether the process of creolization could help us understand how we can seek the common good in societies that are very diverse and unequal.
What is Creolization? How is the concept appropriate to the type of work I do?
The first written use of the word “creole” dates back to the Portuguese language of the 1500s to name people of mixed blood. The word was primarily used to explain the people, language, and ways of life that emerged from plantation societies mainly in the New World, thought it was eventually also used to describe comparable situations on the coasts of Africa and Asia. These outposts of commerce brought enslaved Africans in contact with the Europeans on lands with indigenous populations diminished by the colonial invasion of the settlers. People who had not lived together historically were thrown together in violently unequal relationships that threatened and disturbed the entire existing order of collective meaning. The European expectation was that Europeans could go elsewhere and colonize and remain unchanged. But instead, from these sudden ruptures, new perspectives, largely based on reinvention, restatement, and mistranslation, began to take shape.
What distinguished creolization from other forms of cultural mixing was the radical and intensified nature of the processes that had much to do with the fact that, with the exception of the Amerindians, none of the groups involved was at the moment of meeting rooted in that part of the world. What resulted, in the case of African peoples, was neither the total loss of African culture nor the pure retention of who they were. Instead, in the midst of extreme brutality and hostility, people did not remain isolated from each other but, instead, changed each other. The results contradict the idea of the radical racial separation project that only masters and settlers could change and shape the colonized. In fact, the change happened in all directions.
In most social scientific work, creolization is used to describe the past—to understand languages such as Haitian kreol or samba or particular Caribbean foods. In each example, one can identify all the ingredients and realize that there was no precedent for them to match. The results represent continuity and something radically new and surprising. More important, unlike other forms of cultural mixing, creolization has referred to illicit mixtures or the combination of people who supposedly should not mix because they were considered fundamentally unequal.
For example, French colonizers insisted the French language should not be mixed with languages of the Congo Niger region, since African languages were considered less sophisticated. Thus, the Haitian Creole was described as a “childish” French. In most instances, creolization was not a goal; it was a result that people had to understand. In fact, where people were trying to avoid other groups and trying to remain pure or uncontaminated, creolization was likely to be the result.
This is especially true when groups of people collaborate to try to bring in new projects; they develop new languages and ways of doing things that are based on the resources they all bring. There were efforts in the Caribbean in the 1960s to make a deliberate project of creating cryptic national identities. The argument was to have a nation of nations and thus the different elements had to be combined into one. There was a lot of criticism as to how this was achieved. Some forms of mixing were celebrated at the exclusion of others. Was it not a way of distinguishing the more mixed blacks from the less mixed blacks? Could there be space in this mix for the Indigenous peoples?
Many people want to avoid creolization or, where creolization already exists, initiate decreolization. An example of this is the effort in France to ensure that English words do not contaminate the French language. But there are also cases of U.S. Afrocentrists who see creolization as something that encourages them to be more culturally white when many elements of U.S. hegemonic white culture are antiblack. The difficulty is that U.S. Afrocentrists are already creolized—they are very American in speech and in the way they express their tastes. The argument used by Afrocentrists about creolization seems wrong. In their view, creolization is more tied to blending with whites than necessarily racial mixing with other nonwhite groups who are also pursuing political alternatives.
It is true that creolization can be interpreted in different ways. Some interpretations hinder the view of how race works. Dark-skinned people tend to face denied opportunities more consistently and frequently, which often places darker people at the center of discrimination. And here, it becomes useful to compare creolization with racial democracy. Sociologist and philosopher Paget Henry and other scholars, for example, have pointed out that the processes of creolization do not operate in the same way in all domains of life. Thus, while creolization was evident in literature, folklore, music, and theater in the Caribbean, when one turned to Caribbean philosophy or politics, the same process was distorted and incomplete. When dealing with reason, intellect, and power in Caribbean cultures, there is a tendency of continuous and singular attribution to Europe.
The same can be said in relation to the way in which the concept of racial democracy has been used from the thought of Gilberto Freyre. People tend to love or hate Freyre’s work, but political theorist Sharon Stanley has suggested a different approach—that the concept of racial democracy needs to be creolized. Gilberto Freyre’s thinking is important to the discussion, since his research is methodologically creolized. He criticized the extremes of academic specialization and combined literature, history, economics, and music, challenging racist and antagonistic representations in Brazil regarding the idea that racial mixing with Africans polluted the racial landscape. In addition, in Freyre’s study there is great enthusiasm related to the importance of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultural contributions to the formation of the Brazilian nation.
However, Gilberto Freyre did not perceive these distinct groups in the formation of the Brazilian nation as taxpayers and equal partners: Portuguese and other colonizers in Brazil and their descendants, in his view, for example, were the active agents in the formation of a culture of creolizing. Indigenous populations could only be present in the social formation as people who had disappeared and who did not question the legitimacy of the Brazilian colonial state. Afro-Brazilians could contribute to cultural life, including the food tastes and melodies of music, but not to the political processes of national determination.
For Freyre, when it comes to political life, there is no political creolization. There is no national political conscience that significantly includes and analyzes the goals of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous peoples as part of the national agenda. Racial democracy would need to be more fully realized, more thoroughly creolized.
I am not a specialist in Brazil, so I only offer Stanley’s observation. I do not know the details and I am not an expert on Brazilian politics, but it can be argued that the political situation in Brazil is now a response to former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s efforts to create policies for a more inclusive Brazilian society. The failure to create political life cultivates a legitimate pessimism about the possibility of an inclusive and authentically shared democracy. The more political creolization is postponed or avoided, the more it can appear impossible. One way we can definitely cultivate the resources for the creation of political life is through the creation of an intellectual life over which, for the time being, we have more control.
The curriculum or what we teach communicates who we are, what we can do, what we should be concerned about, and what is worth knowing. Many undergraduate students in Political Science are surprised that there are no more education courses in our department. Their concern is legitimate. After all, schools are typically transformed into primary institutions, through which future generations are cultivated, raising questions about who and what should be reproduced. For this reason, there are no social or political movements seeking transformation (be it progressive or traditionalist) that do not contain a philosophy of education and a corresponding educational program. When we want to build a particular kind of future, we need to cultivate people who think, value and feel in a way that is opposed to many others.
In response to the inequality of creolization in the Caribbean, Paget Henry argues that intellectuals need to undertake a project of reframing African, Afro-Caribbean, Indian and Indian philosophies, expanding areas of the imagination, and re-establishing their authority. The idea is not that any of these groups were all right or knew everything—no one knows everything; all ideas need to be reengaged and constructed—but there are key features in those traditions that should be studied not only by group members, but also by other people. If non-Europeans can learn much from European ideas, the same must be true for African ideas, Amerindian and Indigenous Australasian peoples’ ideas, and so on.
This discussion has to do with an argument that Lewis R. Gordon and I developed. We call this “the pedagogical imperative.” Students often rely on teachers to convey the best stories and theories they have about the different realities they teach. So, for example, if I teach the history of political theory and only present my students with European thinkers, they will think that these are the only people who have contributed to this area. It is my job as a teacher to find out if this is indeed true and if it is not, I must offer a more accurate picture of the meanings of the past and the present. To be a good teacher, we argue, you have to be a great student!
When we do this, the result is almost always creolization. So for example, when teaching philosophy of education, there is a wide range of people who have contributed to the field since everyone had to figure out how to educate future generations. The same goes for women—African American, Chinese, Ethiopian, Native American, etc. Through the engagement many have had, it is important to find out what it means to be a woman, that there is a considerable variety of women who have contributed actively to building a more egalitarian society, and with that in mind we can, for example, think about the relevance of feminism.
So it is with political life. In a world where so many people converge, it is unlikely that any person or group of people will be always be right—especially since the dilemmas we are facing today are new. Finding a broader range of ideas helps us understand the wide array of relationships that are not working; such ideas could help us come up with better solutions with more room for more people.
Schools have been part of the arsenal of colonial and genocidal projects, as well as indispensable sites for cultivating and organizing liberating efforts. If we want to be useful for the subsequent creolization of political power, we must think about how we can unite people and communities through their intellectual products, shaping new forms of political identity and political ideals.
Dr. Rosemere Ferreira Da Silva is Associate Professor at the State University of Bahia (Universidade do Estado da Bahia or UNEB), where she has taught since 2012. Her research focuses on Afro-Brazilian Literature. She is currently writing a book about black intellectuals in contemporary thought. Dr. Da Silva is a Research Scholar in the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs and part of the editorial team of Black Issues in Philosophy.
Dr. Jane Anna Gordon teaches in the Department of Political Science, where she also directs the Doctoral Program, at UCONN-Storrs. Her books include Why They Couldn’t Wait (RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), Creolizing Political Theory (Fordham University Press, 2014), the co-authored Of Divine Warning (Routledge, 2009), the co-edited The Politics of Richard Wright (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and the forthcoming monograph Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge).
