Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Vol. 31, No. 3, July 2010, 279
293

Decolonial pedagogy and the ethics of the global

Noah De Lissovoy*

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, 1 University Station

D5700, Austin, TX 78712, USA

An ethical and democratic globality, and the kind of education that would
contribute to it, are only possible in the context of a recognition of the relations of
power that have shaped history, and in particular the political, cultural, economic,
and epistemological processes of domination that have characterized colonialism
and Eurocentrism. Imagining an ethics of the global in this context means
articulating a decolonial perspective. Starting from recent work in philosophy and
cultural studies, this paper describes key principles of such an orientation to
globality, and develops a reconceptualization of education in the context of this
framework. The article proposes in particular a curriculum against domination,
oriented against the epistemic and cultural violence of Eurocentrism that
underlies the politics of content and knowledge in education, and a pedagogy
of lovingness, committed to building global solidarity based on non-dominative
principles of coexistence and kindredness.
Keywords: curriculum; decolonial theory; ethics; Eurocentrism; globalization;
pedagogy

Introduction
The present historical moment demands of us an urgent response: a vision of a
globality that we can live in, that offers life and meaning to people everywhere. We
can easily have the opposite, a society premised on the familiar inequalities that
characterize actually existing globalization as a political and economic process. But
the transition to the global represents a moment of opportunity, as familiar frames of
reference, organizational structures, and orders of intelligibility weaken. Educators
ought to recognize the special task they are called to in this context, and the necessity
of their participation in the project of materializing democracy on a dramatically
new scale and in a fundamentally new form. However, a truly ethical and democratic
globality, and the kind of education that would contribute and belong to it, are
possible only in the context of a recognition of the relations of power that have
shaped history, and in particular the political, cultural, economic, and epistemolo-
gical processes of domination that have characterized colonialism and Eurocentrism.
Imagining an ethics of the global in this context means articulating a decolonial
perspective. In this paper, starting from recent work in philosophy and cultural
studies, I first describe key principles of such an orientation to globality
in
particular the analysis and critique of epistemic violence, and the construction of
non-dominative relationships across difference. The second part of the paper
describes the reconceptualization of education that such a perspective suggests; in

*Email: delissovoy@mail.utexas.edu
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01596301003786886
http://www.informaworld.com
280 N. De Lissovoy

this connection I outline and develop: (1) a curriculum against domination, which
challenges the material and discursive Eurocentrism that underlies the politics of
knowledge in education, and (2) a pedagogy of lovingness, which builds local and
global solidarities based on the principles of coexistence and kindredness. I do not
attempt here to give a comprehensive account of ethical education in the global era,
but rather to conceptualize several essential principles that ought to guide the
ongoing development of this approach.
Decolonial theory is concerned with confronting, challenging, and undoing the
dominative and assimilative force of colonialism as a historical and contemporary
process, and the cultural and epistemological Eurocentrism that underwrites it.
Decolonial theory might be said to extend the anticolonial project into considerations
of the domains of being and knowing; at the same time it draws from the complex
account of cultural discontinuity and imposition offered by postcolonial studies. It is
by now a vast field, which touches on domains across the disciplines, including
philosophy, literature, sociology, science studies, and ethnic and gender studies. For
the purposes of this paper, which is concerned specifically with the problems posed
for ethics and education in the context of globalization, I am restricting my
framework to scholarship that is concerned with the geopolitics of culture and
knowledge, as these have been conditioned by the historical passages of imperialism
and colonialism.1 It should also be pointed out that this study is situated in a
particular way in relation to this discussion, in this case in the context of the theory
and practice of education in the USA. The positionality of this analysis importantly
shapes the forms in which the problems of ethics, globality, and education appear in
this article. In fact, I believe this situatedness can be helpful in specifying these
general questions and applying them to a concrete national context. In this regard, I
aim here to challenge the attitude of exceptionalism that characterizes public culture
and education in the USA, and to suggest ways in which such a challenge might be
institutionalized in the forms of curriculum and pedagogy that are taken up in
schools.

Conquest and kindredness: power, ethics, and globality

The condition of globality brings to the forefront, in a new way, the ethical problem
of how to live together, and the ontological question of the nature of that
togetherness. Just as globalization considered from a political perspective is not for
the most part a moment of democratic progress, so too the proliferation of global
webs of communication and information, considered from an ethical and cultural
perspective, is not necessarily any less oppressive to those who have historically been
hurt and silenced in the name of development or even internationalism. Nevertheless,
the condition of globality, in revealing the interdependence of peoples, and the
fundamental social and historical linkages that have always existed between societies
(Wolf, 1982), even if they have often been unacknowedged, can potentially provoke a
more authentic, liberatory, and just vision of human community. However, in order
to usefully specify the ethical conditions for our authentic being together in the
world, globality needs to be conceptualized in the context of a sensitivity to
difference, and in particular to the cultural differences that mark the experiences on
either side of the historical passage of colonialism (Fanon, 1963; Mignolo, 2005).
Taking stock of these differences, and imagining a kind of ethics that works through
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 281

them rather than denying them, means confronting conventional assumptions about
culture and history, and challenging normally uninterrogated identifications that are
latent in both teachers and students. It also means a more sensitive orientation to
relationships, both within the classroom and at the level of the imagination of global
society, than the contemporary progressive discourse in education allows us.
As globality reconfigures social and cultural relationships, it also reconfigures the
subjects of those relationships. Not only do different kinds of community confront
each other at the macro-level (e.g. increasingly integrated regional blocs versus
individual states); in addition, different kinds of person are constituted through
membership in diverse local to transnational communities (Appadurai, 2006; Sklair,
2002). In this context, ethical problems involving relationships to others are at the
same time ontological problems, touching on the nature of the new social beings that
are constituted in this process. This is because forms of relationship are not separable
from forms of being. In fact, one can understand human being itself as constituted
by its essential referentiality to others and to the world. For Heidegger (1927/1996),
the world is first of all an aspect of our being, a basic existential spatiality, and only
secondarily an external and encompassing environment. Likewise, he argues, the
essential character of our being with others is not that of existing objectively at the
same time as they do within a shared location; instead, being-with is already a basic
determinant of (human) being itself. In short, we are more than social beings in an
anthropological sense; ontologically, we are given by an even more fundamental kind
of being as dwelling, within which the world and others inhabit and constitute us at
the core.2 This means that judgments about what is authentic or inauthentic in our
relationships, including educational ones, necessarily have implications for the
meaning of the subject itself
i.e. for the content, philosophically speaking, of
who we are (Freire, 1997).
The condition of globality both confirms and challenges this conception of being
and relationships. On the one hand, a new sense of the smallness of the totality,
which emerges as we are brought together by the proliferation of communication and
by a sense of the finitude of the environment, evokes with a new urgency the
existential sense of world as the space of reference and significance of being

against the idea of the world as a merely abstract and limitless Cartesian space of
extension. On the other hand, globalization as a social and cultural process also
brings us face to face with a new landscape of complexity, and with a deeper
experience of difference itself, which challenge any sense of ethics within which
difference is sidelined, and in which the other is returned to a space within the self. In
the first instance, ethical concern for others within contemporary societies must
include a basic respect for cultural differences (Kymlicka, 2001), not simply as
obstacles to be reckoned with on the way to a larger understanding, but as
constituting an essential ethical principle of the human community, or global
common. A cosmopolitan approach to this problem suggests that the negotiation of
differences within this global multiculturalism should reject a priori judgments about
essential and universal human truths (Appiah, 2006). More important than
specifying the positive content of human being, community, and morality, is to
specify in practical terms how these can be constructed dialogically, in a way that
starts from differences and does not deny them, but also does not simply rest in them
(Benhabib, 2002). In this view, if we are committed to an ethics of the global, we start
from the complexities of global multiculturalism to create community, and the
282 N. De Lissovoy

common, within a framework of egalitarianism. Against the idea that ethics begins
from a responsibility to an ontological essence, this approach refuses to abstract from
the inflections that determine the actual shape of global culture.
However, in order to fully acknowledge the importance of differences, especially
in the global era, we first have to critically confront the histories of domination and
violation within which they are constituted. More than a political process of
conquest, this violence is cultural and epistemological as well (Said, 1993). The
project of constructing an ethical globality must confront the concrete production of
global culture, knowledge and subjectivity in the historical context of colonialism. In
addition to material exploitation and oppression, this includes a process of cultural
domination, as non-European populations have historically been forced into a
fundamental condition of alienation by the imposition of Eurocentric values and
forms of subjectivity. For this reason, the legacies of colonialism include an
agonizing search for authenticity by individuals and cultures (Fanon, 1963), as
well as projects of resistance that include a relearning of indigenous forms of being
itself (Mignolo, 2005). The dominative force of colonial logic is multidimensional
and opportunistic. Its violent cartographies of center and periphery reach beyond the
domain of politics and economics even to the level of language, logic, and spirit
(Dussel, 2003), as colonized cultures (and their histories) are constructed as lesser or
partial versions of an authoritative European modernity (Chakrabarty, 2000; Guha,
1997). From this perspective, Heideggers being-with has in fact, as empire and
colonial racism, taken the concrete form of domination (Maldonado-Torres, 2004).
A decolonial perspective on ethics poses the question of the vantage point from
which a global community is imagined. As Mignolo (2005) describes, a vision of this
community that emerges from within the experience of the colonial wound (p. 106)
will look very different from one that emerges from the vantage point of empire.
Against Eurocentric images of a consolidated sociality that binds diverse commu-
nities to shared and absolute principles
for example, private property, tolerance,
or individual rights
a global ethics borne out of the colonial experience starts from
the principle of coexistence, in which the radical differences between hegemonic
and indigenous standpoints are not suppressed. A decolonial perspective on ethics
radicalizes the cosmopolitan and multiculturalist consideration of difference; rather
than a simple contingency to be acknowledged and respected, difference is
understood as bound to histories of resistance and survival. Therefore, a global
ethics and education founded on the principle of coexistence can never surrender the
sovereign right of cultures to their own political, cultural, and epistemological
autonomy (Deloria, 1999; Grande, 2000). This is especially important in the context
of a contemporary globalization that intensifies the appropriation of indigenous
lands, resources, knowledge and cultures within a colonial dynamic that coincides
with and extends transnational processes of capital accumulation (LaDuke, 2005).
A decolonial conceptualization of ethics in the global context offers more than an
alternative to Eurocentric ones; importantly, it exposes the several dimensions of a
constitutive contradiction and hypocrisy in the Western traditions of political and
ethical philosophy, and in the concrete projects of democracy-building that have been
informed by them. In the first place, the enlightenment humanism of Europe
developed together with a systematic refusal of the humanity of the periphery; the
universalism it proclaimed was distorted and attenuated at the very moment of its
enunciation:
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 283

Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men
everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the
corners of the globe. (Fanon, 1963, p. 311)

In a second moment, and in the context of a disavowal of colonialist violence, the

totalizing conceptions of European philosophy and the finality and authoritativeness
of its abstract assertions of the very truth of Being worked to repeat the
disappearance of the other
this time at the level of philosophy itself
that the
violent campaigns of imperialism and the civilizing mission of the church
undertook concretely against actual bodies and minds. While this epistemological
violation cloaked itself discursively in the soaring periods and spectacular subver-
sions of the bourgeois philosophical tradition, in the colonies themselves it produced
the calculations and rationalizations of genocide and cultural annihilation.
Maldonado-Torres (2008) calls this a master morality premised on an absolute
refusal to engage the colonized person as ethical being; for Mills (1997), this is the
discursive norming of non-white bodies as sub-human. This systematic blindness to
the actual violence of conquest, and to the fact of philosophys historical complicity
in the projects of material, epistemological, and spiritual subjugation, results in a
crucial gap or failure in the dominant discourses of ethics and politics, even as they
congeal into the hegemonic common senses of everyday life. Unable to confront and
comprehend the fact of domination, whiteness and Eurocentrism nevertheless
continue to assert themselves as the origin of authentic moral experience and
understanding (e.g. in the detached ratiocination of contemporary analytic
philosophy, or in the discourse of resentment undergirding the moral pedagogy of
the culture industry).
Confronting Eurocentrism and colonialism in history, culture, and knowledge
does not mean rejecting the idea of a common ethical project at the level of the
global, or even the notion of humanism itself. Precisely against the reificatory and
positivistic logic of European knowledge traditions, Deloria (1999) argues for a
knowledge based on a recognition of relationships and interconnectedness. Fanon
(1963) imagines a new and different humanism, against the violent project that has
generally claimed that mantle. And Mohanty (2003) seeks to articulate a politics of
solidarity that forges bonds across differences in a struggle against patriarchy,
colonialism and capitalism. Of course, any effort in this direction has to acknowledge
the difficult conundrum represented by the fact that notions of unity, commonality,
and to some extent even solidarity have been infected by the assimilative impulse of
Eurocentrism, and that any truly global ethics will have to break with the
epistemologically predatory determinations of this tradition. On the other hand,
to reject a global ethical project altogether, and to insist on resting in the moment of
simple difference, is only to recoil into the obverse of a colonial universalism; a
purely deconstructive project cannot offer an alternative to concrete forms of
hegemony. A global ethical and decolonial politics and knowledge ought to be
centered outside of Western traditions while nevertheless reaching out to commu-
nicate with and include them. After all, the hallmark of imperialism and colonialism
are their partitions and divisions of the world; this conceptual and cultural
partitioning ought to be challenged from the standpoint of a global common,
without covertly reinscribing the epistemological centrality of Eurocentric reason.
Such a global standpoint cannot erase its particular nodes and moments in the
284 N. De Lissovoy

process of constructing a singular vision, but should always be the provisional

product of dialogue and collaboration between differences.
In fact, it is increasingly clear that even from within these historical and cultural
differences, we are profoundly imbricated in each other
not merely in the high-
cultural domains of literature and art that postcolonial theory has emphasized
(Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1993)
but also at the level of everyday life and experience. The
networks that characterize transnationalism expose an essential kindredness of
persons and populations to each other, which in being constructed (through
processes of global communication, political movements, and immigration, for
example) turns out in fact to have always already been there. This kindredness can no
longer even be restricted to human beings
the natural facts of ecological
catastrophe and dwindling biodiversity now assert themselves as ethical crises
internal to the global community. A recognition of this basic entanglement does not
mean overwhelming difference in a renewed gesture of universalism, but rather
means imagining an ethical, political, and spiritual foundation for a genuine opening
to the other. Such an opening is not made possible by an abstract imperative to
egalitarian reciprocity (Benhabib, 2002, p. 19); instead, it depends on a radical
receptivity of being, a receptivity which is at the same time a commitment against
violence. Building a global ethical community depends on our recognition of the
natural and constructed family that the planet is, and it means defending that family
and planetary paradigm (Dussel, 1998, p. 4) against the dominative logics and
processes that injure it.

Education, Eurocentrism, and the ethical common

Although education has historically claimed an ethical mission, and has attempted to
articulate senses of pedagogical community that respond to social needs and
dilemmas, posing the question of ethics in the context of globality implies a basic
challenge to actually existing forms of teaching and learning. In the first place, the
senses of community and collaboration that are predominant in educational rhetoric
and methods conceal a consistent commitment to the individual. At a deeper level,
dominant and progressive approaches to education are generally unreflective about
the cultural and epistemological determination of their own basic senses of what
counts as authentic, democratic, and ethical teaching and learning. An ethical
approach to education in the present, if it is to discover the complexly shared history
described above, has to first expose and challenge the historical and contemporary
fact of Eurocentrism in social life, as well as in the processes of curriculum and
instruction themselves.
My argument here responds to the call in recent education research for an
attention to the scale of the global, and for a complex understanding of globality.
Thus, Lingard (2006) argues that education scholarship needs to be deparochialized
beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, and that this new focus needs to be
sensitive to the complexities of globalization as a space of ongoing neocolonial
relationships and cultural hybridization. Indeed, the disciplinary origin of much of
the field of globalization studies in sociology and political science has meant that
considerations of culture and globality have taken place under other headings
in
particular, anthropology and postcolonial studies (e.g. Appadurai, 1996; Said, 1993).
Educational research has been influenced by this disciplinary division. By contrast,
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 285

I believe that educational researchers concerned with globalization should crucially

attend to culture
not as separate from politics or economics, but as deeply
interwoven with these spheres. In addition to challenging the economistic idiom of
much globalization discourse, such a comprehensive attention can on the other hand
have the salutary effect, as Rizvi, Lingard, and Lavia (2006) argue, of making
postcolonial theory itself more critical, inasmuch as it is articulated to a considera-
tion of the ongoing material legacies of imperialism. My foregrounding here of the
notion of the decolonial is an effort in this direction. In contrast to the postcolonial,
the decolonial emphasizes the ongoing process of resistance to colonialism, while
also connoting a wider field of application
one which extends from material
projects that challenge the hegemony of capital to philosophical projects aimed at
reconstructing fundamental understandings of ethics and ontology. Capital itself, as
Hall (1997) argues, is after all not only a crude homogenizing force, but also a
complex dialectic that knows how to work with and through cultural difference as it
constructs the cosmopolitan consumerist spaces of the global postmodern. Critical
education, in this context, should recognize cultural and philosophical questions
about globalization as at once questions about power, domination, and liberation
(Smith, 1999), and should imagine pedagogies informed by an understanding of the
deep collaboration between capitalism and imperialism.

Curriculum against domination

With regard to the formal school curriculum, a decolonial approach oriented toward
the condition of globality would suggest a profound reordering. To begin with, if we
take seriously the analysis and critique I have outlined above, then a consideration of
curriculum has to reach to its very conceptual premises
that is, to the
epistemological principles that secure the legitimacy of the content of what is taught
and learned. Therefore, an anti-dominative approach to curriculum has to do more
than open alternative spaces against the dominant, or create classroom conditions
more welcoming to diverse perspectives. Of course it is important here to draw a
distinction between European and Euro-American culture, on the one hand, and
Eurocentrism on the other. The latter is a dominative orientation within Western
thought, which actively subjugates its periphery, whereas the former is the historical
and complex product of multiple factors, centrally including (but not limited to) the
impulses of Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, Eurocentrism remains pervasive, reaching to
the roots of education and knowledge. It therefore still constructs mainstream
curriculum even where multicultural and critical approaches have been permitted to
modulate it. In addition, as a modality of power, Eurocentrism is more than a mere
instrumentalism; as the discussion above has shown, it is an apparatus of violence
and a discourse of assimilation that actively dominates and destroys. This is in
contrast to the process of ideological hegemony, understood from the familiar critical
perspective, in which power is secured through adherence to a selective common
sense which grounds a positive sociality, even if it is a distorted one (Apple, 2004). A
decolonial approach to curriculum is not only an education oriented against
ideological and discursive common sense (Kumashiro, 2001); it is an education
directed against a violence that reaches to the very conditions of possibility of
knowledge (Tejeda, Espinoza, & Gutierrez, 2003).
286 N. De Lissovoy

This means, first of all, that curricula in science, social studies, literature, and
other content areas need to systematically center both historical and contemporary
contributions to these domains that have emerged from outside of Europe and the
USA (and from marginalized groups within them)
especially as these contributions
reconstruct the essential boundaries and constitutive logics of these disciplines. For
instance, curricula in literature and philosophy should foreground the decisive
contribution of writers and thinkers belonging to the African diaspora from ancient
times to the present, as well as demonstrating how a consideration of these
contributions inflects basic senses of key intellectual movements including human-
ism, secularism, existentialism, etc. (Gordon, 2008). This is not a call for an
essentialist Afrocentrism, or for the privileging of any particular cultural or national
identity. It is, however, a recommendation that Third World, Black and Brown, and
indigenous struggles and perspectives collectively be given a strategic priority in
curricula, within an understanding of the fundamentally hybrid character of culture.
Likewise, even introductory courses in social science should introduce students to the
decisive contributions to this discipline made from the standpoint of historically
marginalized populations, and even to the scientific priority of this knowledge
relative to the partiality of mainstream accounts (Collins, 2000; Harding, 1993). For
example, engaging with the analysis of the Manichean organization of colonial
society in the work of the intellectual and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1963) in a
social studies or history class does not just fill out a previously incomplete
curriculum; instead, it provides crucial keys to problems of global social structure
and group identity that otherwise remain insoluble.
However, the decentering of the dominant content and standpoint is only the first
step in an anti-dominative curriculum that is adequate to the present moment. In
addition, this curriculum should become the foundation of a positive and synthetic
project. Beyond engaging with critical accounts, and with subjugated knowledges,
students should be provided a framework within which to imagine a new global
knowledge, culture, and society. Starting from a respect for the dignity of all subjects,
and especially those who have historically been oppressed and exploited (Dussel,
2003), from an acknowledgment of the principle of coexistence between cultures
rather than separation or assimilation (Mignolo, 2005), and from a rejection of
the absolute violence of (neo)colonial sovereignty (Mbembe, 2001), an anti-
dominative curriculum can exceed the moment of negation and clear the space for
the construction of a new and authentic global identification and solidarity. This
project also suggests a deep destabilization of our notion of curriculum, since it
becomes less the name for an organized content or educational experience, and more
the designation for the process of construction itself of an unprecedented knowledge.
For instance, the notion of transnationalism might be appropriated as the starting
point, not just for analyses of contemporary capitalism or immigration patterns, but
also for the understanding by young people of the complex global itineraries of the
very forms of youth culture in which they participate.
To the extent that a decolonial curriculum is premised on a sense of globality
of
geopolitics, cultural communication, migration, etc.
not defined by domination, it
is also determined against the racist partitions that define the colonial standpoint. If
we are to construct a critical pedagogy oriented to a sense of the global common as
community, this means more than teaching and learning about distant places. It
means more, even, than developing the habits of mind . . . needed to engage in an
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 287

ever more complex globally linked world (Suarez-Orozco & Sattin, 2007, p. 12). It
means understanding the processes of material and cultural conquest that construct
some places as peripheral and some as central, and it means decentering the
apparent author of this history. One of the most radical implications of decolonial
and postcolonial theory is the idea that the colonizer is also essentially the product of
the process of colonization (Bhabha, 1994). This means that the meanings of US
history and culture, in particular, are only accessible in the context of a consideration
of its imperialist projects, from the New World to the rest of the world. This implies
a curriculum that starts from the vantage points of this other world, and which can
uncover the richness of global historical and cultural diversity not as they have been
annexed by Eurocentric history and social science, but as they have been determined
against it. For instance, this means abandoning the common representation in school
curricula of the histories of the Africa, Asia, and Latin America in terms of a
narrative of failed or lagging civilization (Chakrabarty, 2000), and instead under-
standing their proper historical authority and agency. Only on the basis of this
clearing of the ground can education begin to participate in the construction of a
genuinely global community. This clearing reaches to the roots: To which flag do we
in fact pledge allegiance, and on the basis of which pledge are our identities
determined? These questions are made even more urgent by a recognition of the
many stateless refugees and occupied populations that are refused a politically
recognized nationality altogether. Helping students to find a place for themselves
within globality, which is not a flag at all, but rather a cloth of difference and
entanglement, means wrenching the curriculum from narrow cultural and political
identifications (Gaudelli & Heilman, 2009). We can then find the ways we can be
connected to others, to whom in fact we are already bound (within the global
common) like close cousins, whether we realize it or not.
In the case of the USA, this discussion suggests a shift from an inward-looking
multiculturalism to a global perspective that understands the problems of culture
and power as linked to geopolitical and geocultural dynamics (McCarthy, 1998). For
instance, in attempting to make sense of new racisms against immigrants in terms of
familiar efforts at bias reduction or even challenges to dominant institutional
cultures, multiculturalism overlooks the implication of the state and the market in
the production of these discriminatory attitudes and practices. There is an important
articulation between imperialism (as cultural, political, and economic process),
nationalism, and racism (Amin, 1997), a nexus that is undertheorized in education.
Thus, in the context of a complexly integrated North American economic region, the
mobilization of a virulent xenophobia against Mexican immigrants in the USA (and
very often students in particular) has political and economic uses that cannot be
understood from the perspective of a liberal pluralist embrace of cultural difference.
Beyond curricula that promote respect and tolerance, or even critical media literacies
aimed at uncovering systematic biases in popular culture, a decolonial curriculum
would include a thoroughgoing interrogation of nationalism. While this is an
important project everywhere in the global era, in the centers of global power and
privilege it takes on a special urgency, since a deconstruction of nationalism in these
contexts is at once an interrogation of one of the ideological pillars of global
imperialism itself (De Lissovoy, 2008). Such an approach also differs from a
traditional left internationalism in recognizing the crucial role of US exceptionalism
as a contemporary racist formation (and politically effective as such) that is endemic
288 N. De Lissovoy

across the political spectrum. To invite students into a discussion of this domain is to
invite them beyond the borders of familiar and permissible discourse, and it is to have
faith in their ability to imagine radically different identifications from those they have
been previously afforded.
In an important intervention into the field of curriculum from a postcolonial
perspective, Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001) describe how Third World writers and
artists propose precisely these imaginative possibilities to teachers and students.
These authors argue that in recoding (or double coding) traditional and Western
tropes and idioms, and in countering hegemonic representations with a utopic
aesthetic, postcolonial texts destabilize the monological voice and binary oppositions
that characterize Eurocentric understandings of culture and education. Postcolonial
theory in general has had a crucial impact on educational scholarship, leading to a
deep questioning of essentialist readings of race and culture, and an emphasis on the
generative possibilities of working from the interstices of identities and cultures in
emancipatory and multicultural teaching (Asher, 2005; Hickling-Hudson, 2003).
Nevertheless, if we want to work toward a comprehensive praxis that confronts the
continuum from cultural and epistemological oppression to colonialism as an
ongoing political, economic, and ontological condition, we will have to resist an
overly aestheticized perspective and an overly celebratory approach to the hybridized
condition of the global. In the first place, the heteroglossic spaces and communities
that educators have gestured toward on the basis of the postcolonial are only possible
if the reservoirs of domination that feed the Wests pathologization of its others are
exposed and denounced. As I have suggested, this is perhaps more usefully
conceptualized as a decolonial rather than a postcolonial project. This is a project
that encompasses the realms of culture and discourse, but which also links them to
the materiality of history. It is a directed political and educational effort, which calls
on teachers not merely to complexify what is taken for granted, but also to confront
and challenge the sources and centers of Eurocentrism, imperialism, and dominative
power.

Pedagogy of lovingness
A decolonial reconceptualization of social relationships has important implications
not only for understandings of curriculum content, knowledge, and ideology, but
also importantly for pedagogy
understood as the ethical problem of the form of the
relationships between students and teachers (Freire, 1998), and between students and
global society generally. Thinking through the ethical in this context means
imagining a kind of connection that resists both the authoritarianism of traditional
models of instruction as well as the assimilative benevolence of familiar progressive
approaches. In particular, corresponding to the essential condition of kindredness
which I described earlier as characterizing the deep culture of the global era, I
propose here a pedagogical orientation of lovingness. This orientation can be
distinguished from the simple attitude of caring, which is influential in progressive
education, in centering an awareness of cultural difference while developing an
enlarged solidarity that reaches beyond the local and the nation to participate in the
construction of a global community.
Proponents of caring recommend a recognition of the concrete textures of human
relationships in education, and their prioritization over the purely academic or
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 289

cognitive dimension (Noddings, 1992, 1999). Grounded in Heideggers insight into

the fundamentally relational character of being, this perspective insists on the
importance of teaching what it is to authentically care for others. But just as
Heideggers ontology ignores cultural differences, as well as the histories of
domination which underlie them, in the same way the philosophy of caring in
education has tended to ignore differences between different groups of students, and
the power effects involved with them.3 To take one example: for North American
students to respond, humanly and ethically, to the plight of their most oppressed
peers in the Middle East, means challenging the assumptions of proximity and
transparency in the modeling of caring that is recommended in the literature (the
idea that those for whom we should care are right next to us, and that who they are is
self-evident to us). It means being able to navigate the complex ideological terrain
that always already mediates our access (in the media and public discourse) to these
others and the challenges they face (Rizvi, 2005). In fact, this ethical response must
include a struggle against the systematic violence that is the result of contemporary
neocolonialism. Lovingness, in contrast to caring (as it has been developed in the
educational context) implies, as ethical principle, a basic negation of the system of
domination, rather than a modulation of its conditions.
This emphasis recalls Paulo Freires (2005) insistence on an armed love (p. 74)
which backs up its concern for the oppressed with a militant commitment to action.
However, while my notion of lovingness preserves this orientation to action, it is
different from this conception in refusing to completely fold the ethical response into
an organized impulse or program. A recognition of the reality and potentiality of the
common, and the relationships of kindredness that characterize it, implies a
responsibility to a complex conversation between differences, and a communal
solidarity grounding social life (Dei, 2000, p. 74), that has to precede, as its basis, any
decided political rationale. This is more than a sensitivity to the profoundly
intercultural educational condition that globality proposes (Sussmuth, 2007). Rather,
students can begin to recognize the ontological, anthropological, and historical
relationships
both the material facts, and the imaginative possibilities
that tie
them to others, and which demand an urgent response when any within this circle are
injured or exploited. For instance, the complex global circuits of commodity
production and consumption imply an immediate responsibility to working people
(including children) in apparently distant places; in fact, in economic, political, and
ethical terms, these places and workers
and the struggles they face
are not distant
at all. The violence done in refusing to acknowledge their exploitation is intimate. If
education has to make persons, and not just scholars, a point that is made in
different ways by critical pedagogists (Giroux, 1988) and proponents of indigenous
education (Deloria, 1999), then our parsimonious senses of the ethical requirements
of personhood must be challenged at the same time. The exposure of the narrow
technical character of education should also be a revelation of the profound
imbrication of beings in each other. Students arrive at this sense not through
adherence to the proper ideology, but rather in a confrontation with the facts
themselves of conquest and resistance, and through a fundamental respect for the
dignity of ethical subjects (Dussel, 2003, p. 170) even when these subjects speak from
within the shadows of historical marginalization.
In addition, this lovingness, as a point of departure for teaching, needs to be
sensitive to and respectful of the different locations of different groups within the
290 N. De Lissovoy

complex community of the global. If critical perspectives have sometimes claimed to

know the proper truth and path for all of the oppressed, a decolonial ethics should
instead hold to the paradigm of coexistence (Mignolo, 2005), which allows for
different paths and different truths, and to a sense of the complexity of a
decolonizing solidarity and agency (Villenas, 2006). In the context of globalization,
white students and those from dominant cultural groups, in learning about world
history in general and indigenous struggles in particular, should be taught an attitude
of listening, respect, and cautiousness that is informed by an understanding of the
violence wrought by centuries of material and cultural plunder of non-European
peoples by the West (Smith, 1999), and by a challenge to racism as a global political
project (Leonardo, 2002). There is an opportunity here not only for a widening but
also for a deepening of instruction, as students learn not only different histories, but
are introduced as well to different epistemologies which ground the search for
knowledge and educational relationships in the first place. In general, students and
teachers ought to be sensitive both to what is shared in this global moment and what
is not, and aware of how the web of planetary relationships needs to be made
adequate to a truly ethical vision of culture and society, rather than continuing to be
defined by domination and marginalization.

Conclusion
The condition of globalization has created a set of practical and political challenges
that can no longer be ignored by educational scholars and practitioners. As many
have observed (e.g. Banks, 2008; Suarez-Orozco & Sattin, 2007), familiar forms of
curriculum and instruction are inadequate as a framework for students in the context
of the complex landscape of interdependence that characterizes the contemporary
era. However, the long history of struggles against colonialism, and the decolonial
intellectual project that this article has started from, shows that the problem of
globalization for educationalists is more than a technical one. Globalization is a
problem as much of the persistent effects of imperialisms master morality
(Maldonado-Torres, 2008) as it is of the uneven development of a new social
infrastructure. Eurocentrism has decisively shaped the forms that globality has taken;
contemporary education will have to confront this historical fact and process in
order to be adequate to its historical moment. It has often been observed that
education is fundamentally an ethical process and problem; the same is true of
globalization itself. Students and teachers have to understand the fact of political
conquest and the process of cultural and epistemological assimilation corresponding
to it, and participate in the unraveling of these processes, if they are to be involved in
a truly democratic form of education. However simple it seems on the surface, a true
commitment in this direction would move curriculum and instruction decisively
beyond traditional progressive and even critical educational approaches, as I have
described above. In my account of the outlines of a curriculum against domination,
and a pedagogy of lovingness, this paper has made an effort to move this
conversation forward. These interventions are contributions to what needs to be a
global educational dialogue, built from diverse interventions diversely situated, if we
are to create a truly ethical and decolonial pedagogy oriented to the scale of the
planet itself, and if educators are to contribute to a larger liberatory movement
determined against global violence, exploitation, and oppression.
 Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 291

Notes
1. This means I do not draw on work that is concerned solely with particular local contexts, or
on scholarship that does not have significant implications for ethics or epistemology.
2. Of course, this very emphasis on ontological imbrication, in the context of a disavowal of
difference and domination, itself constitutes a violent mode of assimilation, as I describe
below.
3. This problem in care theory has been commented on in educational scholarship in terms of
racial difference (see Thompson, 1998); in the context of globalization these inadequacies
are perhaps all the more glaring.

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