Thesis Chapters by Ebony Rose
This paper defines and unpacks Loic Wacquant’s concepts of Workfare and Prisonfare, coupled with ... more This paper defines and unpacks Loic Wacquant’s concepts of Workfare and Prisonfare, coupled with a discussion of Tendayi Sithole’s concept of Deathscapes and his appropriation of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as to why urban schools are poverty storage facilities for black youth. I address the centrality of the states social and penal policies in the reconfiguration of urban schools under a death politic guided by the deployment of both a neoliberal-paternalism and anti-black racist methodology. I argue, through the creation of workfare and prisonfare those urban schools eradicate black existence by conditioning low-income black students for low-wage labor or the prison. Next, this paper examines reproduction theory in education. Reproduction theory in education in regards economics is an outdated model, that rests on the assumption of a low-skill labor market that poor white students are being prepared for working class blue collar jobs. Previous reproduction in education theories are insufficient to explain how the schooling experiences of black youth in a punitive neoliberal post-industrialize world relate to the production of social, political and economic inequality. As urban schools are producing criminal subjects in surplus not workers. Lastly, I discuss the limitations and weaknesses of fighting for racial equality and radical transformation in our anti-black capitalist society. A Racial Realist framework advocated by Derrick Bell will ground my discussion on the possibilities for black youth resistance.
This paper defines and unpacks Loic Wacquant’s concepts of Workfare and Prisonfare, coupled with ... more This paper defines and unpacks Loic Wacquant’s concepts of Workfare and Prisonfare, coupled with a discussion of Tendayi Sithole’s concept of Deathscapes and his appropriation of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as to why urban schools are poverty storage facilities for black youth. I address the centrality of the states social and penal policies in the reconfiguration of urban schools under a death politic guided by the deployment of both a neoliberal-paternalism and anti-black racist methodology. I argue, through the creation of workfare and prisonfare those urban schools eradicate black existence by conditioning low-income black students for low-wage labor or the prison. Next, this paper examines reproduction theory in education. Reproduction theory in education in regards economics is an outdated model, that rests on the assumption of a low-skill labor market that poor white students are being prepared for working class blue collar jobs. Previous reproduction in education theories are insufficient to explain how the schooling experiences of black youth in a punitive neoliberal post-industrialize world relate to the production of social, political and economic inequality. As urban schools are producing criminal subjects in surplus not workers. Lastly, I discuss the limitations and weaknesses of fighting for racial equality and radical transformation in our anti-black capitalist society. A Racial Realist framework advocated by Derrick Bell will ground my discussion on the possibilities for black youth resistance.
Drafts by Ebony Rose
By providing the readers with some context in which Black Arts, Black Power Freedom Movements, an... more By providing the readers with some context in which Black Arts, Black Power Freedom Movements, and Black Aesthetics matured Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, juxtaposed with Jodi Melamed’s Represent and Destroy :Rationalizing Violence In the New Racial Capitalism, and Jordan T. Camp’s Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State we can potentially navigate ourselves out of the muck of the class and/or/vs race but asking a different question: how do the authors identify the relationship of race and capitalism, and how does the expressive culture of the Black Radical Tradition produce alternative epistemologies about different social and economic systems and relations grounded in Black cosmologies ? I will argue in this paper that the Black Radical Tradition needs to become fully conscious of it-self in order frame addressing the race/class nexus (Fanon, 1967, in Welcome, 2007; Robinson, 1983/2000). Nonetheless, we need to pay attention to the modern movements and the practices on how to exposes the contradictions between race and capitalism. First, I will provide a quick historical development of the Black Radical Tradition through Robinson’s Black Marxism, where he traces the Black Radical Tradition from the 16th century to the present. Second, this will take us to the 1960s-1960s of transnationalism, and anti-imperialism of black freedom fighters Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, MLK Jr, and how this time was an opportune time for both black, natives and the global take advantage of that moment. Thereby producing a mature black radical formation constituted on the multiple crisis of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I will list what in my view characterizes a modern Black Radical Tradition.
This paper will revisit my thesis to reformulate a new understanding of how essential the collabo... more This paper will revisit my thesis to reformulate a new understanding of how essential the collaboration of Michel Foucault’s Biopolitics (2003) (which is not discussed in my thesis) is to a (re)conceptualization of necropolitics, population regulation, and life optimization by the state/sovereignty in order to better understand contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death. I will utilize biopower as articulated by Foucault, and necropower as mapped out by Mbembe’s description of late modernity state violence (or violence under contemporary sovereignty) as methodological tools to examine, Why and for what reasons do schools offer poor children free meals, take home laptops, free eye exams and dental check-ups while engaging in symbolic-objective-structural violence and implementing, securitization, militarizing and policing poor black youth bodies in the same spaces?
these important conceptual lenses are essential for us to understand of the totality of all existence, life and/or/both death. By connecting biopower with necropower , I can attempt to unpack some of these questions : What does it mean to have black skin in a world governed by an advanced neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy? “What role do schools and other educational institutions play in an era where black bodies in urban cities are experiencing redundancy, surplus, disposability and dispossessed subjectivities?”
I want to focus on what I think the purpose of schooling is : the mass extermination and life management/optimization of all poor, female, queer, black life/bodies subjectivities. After I finished my thesis I begin exploring how a black social death is lived through a black social life and a black social life is lived though a black social death (Saxton, 2012). For me, black bodies are engaged and disengaged in a politics that is neither a pure form of life (let live, make life) or death (make death or let die), but a complex management of the two (Bhungalia, 2012). I will analyze this necro-bio dynamic as remains under/un-theorized, and unexamined in current education scholarship, thus, rendering black subjectivities obsolete. This leaves our analysis of contemporary forms of sovereignty in education. The necro-biopower collaboration has a home in critical/political/Marxist/Feminist/Black geography, Social theory and Black Studies but in radical/critical education scholarship only one scholar to date, Tyson E. Lewis (2006, 2010) has theorized concepts of Agamben, Foucault to coin biopedagogical and necropedagogical/thanatopedagogy (a pedagogy to end all education life).
First this paper will discuss Michel Foucault foundation of his ideas, and why more than a critic... more First this paper will discuss Michel Foucault foundation of his ideas, and why more than a critical intervention from scholars of color is needed. Moreover, we should be aware that not only were Foucault’s deficient of political ideas or a vision of what the world ought to be, but in neglecting question of the human he indirectly made a very ontological statement “only white lives matter”. His ideas are well-known already and I don’t want to site them there or spend a lot of paper space discussing them, what is more important is who and what he represent. Secondly, I want to turn my focus on Marx, to argue that Marxism and Marxist do not and cannot provide us a solution to black suffering. I am not against Marxism, I believe that capitalist exploitation dominates the world and I am against it, but the ontological question “what and who is human?” when answer by the Marxist is always the white, worker, male. So if blacks are outside of human whose racial experiences are not relevant then how can we understanding the student slave, the worker slave, when chattel slavery has already ended? If black people are surplus, therefore disposable, then what is left of Marx? If black people do not have function or purpose within capitalism? I want to follow up with offering an alternative, the work of black feminist Sylvia Wynter is vital to understanding the racialization and the category of human in western modernity (Weheliye, 2014), I will attempt to piece together her call for a new humanism, alongside and relation to work by Afro-Pessimist and Critical Race Theory to gain a perspective of racialization and what does that mean for black students in the Afterlife. In all, I want to argue that the afterlife should be a more proper way of looking at history and progress here in the West. This will cause us to rethink slavery and freedom. Hopefully I will be able to messy picture of schooling where black children are posted to a social death but life is also worth living. To life a life in death or black life is not white social life.
This paper will examine these racial formation processes by situating the spaces and places poo... more This paper will examine these racial formation processes by situating the spaces and places poor blacks congregate US and Brazil within the global racial regime of domination, in which carcerality plays a central role (Alves 2012, 2016). I will draw from the literature of African Diaspora as an analytical framework articulated by Alves (2012, 2016) as he extends the work of Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, Jared Sexton, Paul Gilroy, Henri Lefebvre and others. The literature on black genocide is essential to suggest a “supra-national geography of death” (Vargas, 2010, as cited in Alves, 2012) and geography of resistance forged by people living under a racial regime of terror (Gilroy, 1993, as cited in Alves, 2012). The spatialized nature of antiblackness is what I am primary concerned as is circulates across oceans and large land masses to establish a global white supremacy can be easily located within different territories where black life is in a permanent state of siege, whether in Brazil, the United States or elsewhere. In Brazil and the US, statistics illustrate the deadly consequences of these economies of violence. They have evinced a historical pattern of black vulnerability to death energized by state technologies of confinement such as racial segregation, police violence and mass incarceration (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; James, 1996; Nascimento, 1989; Russell-Brown, 1998; Silva, 1998; Vargas, 2010 as cited in Alves, 2012). Conceiving the African Diaspora as mutually constituted through death, space and resistance is to account for its ghastly, yet, promising outcome: the anti-black project that constitute the nation state also provide the context in which a transnational black politics may emerge (Alves, 2016). It is both theoretically and politically relevant to reclaim black urban life and to account for a transnational black subjectivity produced in such deathly spatialities, since if blacks are always and already marked as socially dead (Sexton, 2011; Wilderson, 2003). Drawing on these insights, let me offer then a conceptualization of the African Diaspora we can speak of “black spatialities”, I am also referring to the geographies of death generated by the state—such as the prison, the favela, the cemetery, the (necro)polis—which have profoundly shaped black urban lives (Alves, 2012; Mbembe, 2003; McKittrick, 2006). In discussing black bodies and blackness, I want to continuously articulate that nothing can relate to blackness and if therefore outside of relation to humanity and possibility, at least in this current historical epoch. Nothing protects blacks at the end of the day against anti-blackness, as the social and economic indicators objectively prove that life changes are related to once racial positionalities and that the closer you are to blackness the greater level of disadvantages (Paixao, 2010; Telles, 2006; Winant, 2001, as cited in Vargas, 2012). Therefore, we should view the deteriorating boundaries between geo-political borders as one planetary system as they are woven together not by different racial formations separated by space and place but as bounded by ontologies and material structures that shape and over-determine the experience of black bodies on the planet.
I will argue in this paper that the Black radical tradition needs to become fully conscious of it... more I will argue in this paper that the Black radical tradition needs to become fully conscious of it-self in order frame a radical black studies alterity perspective within the Black radical tradition (King, 2007; Robinson, 1983/2000). First, I will provide a quick historical development of the Black Radical tradition through Robinson’s Black Marxism, where he traces the Black radical tradition from the 16th century to the present. Second, this will take us to the 1960s-1960s of transnationalism, and anti-imperialism of black freedom fighters Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, MLK Jr, and how this time was an opportune time for both black, natives and the global take advantage of that moment. I will utilize Wynter’s and Weheliye’s work to understand how black studies came to be and the possibilities it presented us and why its essential to a black centric episteme . Third, I will intervene on the debates about Afro-Pessimism and where it stands in the pantheon of black critical thought. Making concessions that the scholarly works of Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton rejuvenated younger peoples interest in Africana Studies, Black Studies and Critical social theory, and infused different interpretation of Fanon, nonetheless Afro-Pessimism I argue is a misinterpretation, of Frantz Fanon work in totality, and misrecognition agency and relationality in his writing. Thereby, limiting the truly radical possibility of using a pessimist reading of the universe. We should look to Wynter’s and Gordon’s Fanon, rather than the “political ontology” of Agamben reading of Fanon in Wilkerson’s III, and Sexton work. Last, but not least, and I will attempt to also undo the abuse of the colonial order that by looking at Wynter’s Black studies alterity perspective pedagogy to understand do we as black people along with red, Latino and native people of the world bring a closure to the current episteme? To concertize our discussion of Black studies I will use Joyce E. King’s (2007) work of “Critical Studyin’” which ties together all the critical ideas in this paper into a comprehensive framework from the position of the liminal. How did we get here? Why is fanon and Wynter important to understand the situation we are in currently? Why black studies? These questions and answers are grounded in a black studies perspective. This is grounded in the sociocultural and historical experience of the liminality of African-descent people (King, 2006). As intellectuals, we have a role to play, just as we have done in the past by being on the ground by articulating a order by creating new cultural codes aside of the natural biological ones that exist. Agreeing with Wynter “Black Studies is really in the forefront of the battle against ‘Man’ and for the human, and to begin to put it forward in that re-conception.
This paper will attempt to analyze major themes that are of most interest to me while sadly leavi... more This paper will attempt to analyze major themes that are of most interest to me while sadly leaving out others (anti-colonialism) as much as I can of Sylvia Wynter and Paulo Freire. The first section will introduce Sylvia Wynter which will include a brief genealogy of her massive collection of work. I will argue why will not receive the same recognition as her Western and Anglo counterparts as she leverages her black Jamaica womanness to formulate a critique against the west. Wynter’s work is extremely eclectic and far reaching in depth and breath, is like the eclecticism of Freire which explains my attraction to both thinkers. The second section will understand the importance of praxis of being a human mean. Where do ideas of what it means to be human originate from in their work? Humanization, the “human,” and praxis and the human as a verb will be explored in this section. And how can we combine both understanding of the human as ontological, experiential, existential, historical and epistemic. The next section will try to unpack what do race, blackness, class and Marxism must do with them as individuals and how does this manifest itself in their work. Moreover I argue that their social location and positionalities in the world is one explanation of why they have two different interpretation of the same text, in particular when it comes to Fanon’s work on colonialism and “the fact of blackness” and Marx’s analysis of capitalism and the role of the political economy in the material development of social organization . Last I will propose Joyce E. King’s (2007)“Critical Studyin’” as a method to combine blackness with a critical pedagogy. This I think has the potential as a decolonizing response to present conditions. a decolonizing pedagogy is about challenging the very idea of what it means to be human, and by extension, the logics of inclusion and exclusion that inforce social boundaries that consequently function to maintain the antiblack founding and liminal categories of nigger/native and Man 2 of the current epistemic cultural framework of the West. Being human is impossible within the current order. I believe both Freire and Wynter can together form a decolonizing praxis to usher move us beyond man and towards the human.
According to Sylvia Wynter, Western Europeans, invented Man (the white, masculinist, Western, mid... more According to Sylvia Wynter, Western Europeans, invented Man (the white, masculinist, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, imperialist version of the Human) and projected him onto the past as natural and timeless, rather than historical and cultural (Wynter, 1994 2000, 2006, 2006b). In other words, the West does not perceive themselves as representing/practicing one of many specific historical, cultural, and local “genres” of human, but THE HUMAN created by/with their own scientific and now economic systems of knowledge (Wynter, 1994, 2006, 2006b). This explanation, Wynter (2006) calls “Man” as the “descriptive statement of the human,” hereby setting up ontological notions of human that are fixed which functions to dislocate the Global South and the East (niggers, natives, and the global poor) as found outside of the desires/ideal goals of material redemption and the ideal self as white nation-state imperial leaders, to occupy the position of “not-not-quiet, not-humans” (Wynter, 1994, 2000, 2006, 2006b). Consequently, blacks (niggers), natives (savages), and the global poor live and experience a symbolic death through their ejection from economic, civil, social, and cultural life from the global-white-middle-class-economic elites- intellectual class of the metropole and the global North west.
This explains why education curriculum proposed by global finance, banking and educational organizations/institutions disrupt, disavow, exterminate, or murder indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, languages, ways of knowing, ways of being by positioning it as inferior knowledge production and primitive strategies for capital accumulation when compared to the West scientific and economic methods (Fals-Borda and Mora-Osejo, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Shizha, 2011; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2001; Wynter, 1994, 2006, 2006b). This epistemic genocide or “murder” in the words of Skutnabb-Kangas is how late-modernity/late capitalism/neo-colonialism/advance capitalism operates under the languages and economic policies of “neoliberal-globalization (Rizvi and Lingard) that seeks to promote and English only education that values the Western methods to address and solve issues resources scarcity, economic development and process, cultural deficiencies, and technological modernization (Barua, 2011). Therefore, this education curriculum, is anti-black, anti-native, anti- Indigenous anti-global poor, and thereby anti human. The curriculum promoted by the IMF and World Bank produces discourses and policies that always give evidence supporting the proposition that the West is the basis for the universal economic human subject and the East and Global South lack these essential characteristics.
In this paper, I will read the class text from weeks seven through thirteenth as examples of “southern theory” (Connell, 2007). The text will be used as evidence to argue that the present description of what it is to be human is being contested and struggled over by the global poor and Indigenous communities. Through their resistance, members of the global south now challenge our notion that Man is the only proper way of understanding the world. Their struggles over curricula, knowledges, and ways of being offers empirical evidence “the human” is always plural and always an emerging process. Through Sylvia Wynter’s writing, I will be able to offer an alternative conception of the human (Freire, and Fanon too!!) that builds on current critiques of man (the class text) therefore opening radical possibilities to bring a closure to the West and experiment with re-imaging alternatives to hegemonic descriptive statement of the human!
In 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that no descendent of Africa... more In 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that no descendent of African people brought to America involuntarily as “articles of merchandise” could be, or was ever intended by the framers to be, a citizen under the US Constitution. I argue that Blacks still occupy this questionable “non-human/non-citizen/slave” category which allows the police to suspend their obligation to the law when it comes to policing Black communities. Using the personal testimonies of Black people’s experiences with police in the 2017 Chicago Department of Justice report, I demonstrate how and why Black peoples struggle against the police in the afterlife of slavery. This struggle, moves black communities to united against the police who are experienced as an “occupying force,” that exemplifies the myth of “post-emancipation” as the police function as 21st Century field hands and slave catchers. Only without the police would a free society be possible.
Conference Presentations by Ebony Rose
Loic Wacquant (2009) conceptualizes the carceral turn in late modernity as the by-product of a ne... more Loic Wacquant (2009) conceptualizes the carceral turn in late modernity as the by-product of a neoliberal-reconfiguring Leviathan. This led to the states’ meshing its social and penal arms as a strategy to solve the social and economic crisis that emerged in the mid-70s (Wacquant, 2009). His analysis and others’ similar analyses are insufficient for (re)conceptualizing the carceralization of black bodies historically, which is situated in a transcendent anti-black world structured by “the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence” (Saxton, 2012, p. 27). For blacks, the physical, symbolic, psychological, and socio-economic forms of confinement that imprison them tell an incomplete narrative of the black experience in this anti-black, white supremacist, empire racial-state. I argue that an emergent black radical cartography of carceral geography should exceed the theoretical preoccupations of the material body to provide a close reading of the black body as a negative one that’s exclusively exposed to the highest form of vulnerability under the guise of Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” (2003) and life-optimization and population management under Michel Foucault’s “Biopolitics” (1976). For me, black bodies are engaged and disengaged in a politics that is neither a pure form of life or death but a complex management of the two (Bhungalia, 2012). This bio-necro collaboration (Puar, 2007) produces the systematic extermination of black existences, ontologies, and epistemologies that supra-exceeds the architecture of a prison, school or housing project into the socio-spatial carceralization of what I term “life/death worlds”.
Papers by Ebony Rose
CURRICULUM INQUIRY, 2019
In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in C... more In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in Caribbean, European, African, and American societies. In addition, her work demonstrates how education globally structures a particular cultural, historical, and onto-epistemic anti-Black/anti-Indigenous worldview. In Wynter’s most neglected piece of work ‘Do Not Call Us Negros’ How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism she weaponizes the second and third wave of her work1 to unpack and provide a fresh critique to the Black English debates that occurred in California in the 1990s. In this, she reframes debates about history curriculum and culture from a white conservative nativist one of Man (the status quo) to the alternative Black Studies Alterity Perspective rooted in the liminal Black socio-historical-cultural experiences. Continuing Wynter’s layered excavation of education as the site of EuroAmerican cultural reproduction, I sketch out a different philosophical discourse to those grounded in capital and/or race debates of the social sciences; I present a philosoph- ical European coming of age story of humanism as a distant stage in how the West became self-aware and created a consciousness of itself. In doing so, this Western European humanism, or what Wynter coins Man for short, embarked on a 500-year journey of colonialism/coloniality to plunder the gifts and talents of the minds and bodies of non-middle-class, non-European populations through a process/technique of what I coin Neocolonial Mind Snatching.
Black History Bulletin , 2019
The authors question "black capitalism" as an alternative to "capitalism" and a nuance discussion... more The authors question "black capitalism" as an alternative to "capitalism" and a nuance discussion on why working class black families send their children to charter schools. Moreover, there is a culturally responsive lesson plan at the end of our paper, along with others in this edition as well.
BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN, 2016
As an activist scholar, this themed edition of the Black History Bulletin focused on the " crisis... more As an activist scholar, this themed edition of the Black History Bulletin focused on the " crisis in Black education " is deeply personal to me. My early and late childhood experiences in a home with a mother who was addicted to drugs and a father who was absent inform how I write and think about Black life and death. Therefore, this article will be an examination of schooling for Black youth from low-income families—an intersection between academic scholarship and an autobiographical account. Moreover, I highlight four critical aggressions that contribute to the crisis in Black education: (1) micro interactions between teacher and student within the broader context of macro relationships; (2) reproduction of oppressive systems resulting from anti-Black racist methodology; (3) extermination of the Black subject while maintaining the body for capitalistic exploitation; and (4) securitizing schools and criminalizing Black youth. I surmise that the dialectical nature of schooling exposes Black youth to life and death, and the current dialectical nature must be understood as one of the first steps to address the ongoing crisis.
Books by Ebony Rose
#BRokenPromises, Black Deaths, & Blue Ribbons, 2018
In 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that no descendent of Africa... more In 1857, the US Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, ruling that no descendent of African people brought to America involuntarily as “articles of merchandise” could be, or was ever intended by the framers to be, a citizen under the US Constitution. I argue that Blacks still occupy this questionable “non-human/non-citizen/slave” category which allows the police to suspend their obligation to the law when it comes to policing Black communities. Using the personal testimonies of Black people’s experiences with police in the 2017 Chicago Department of Justice report, I demonstrate how and why Black peoples struggle against the police in the afterlife of slavery. This struggle, moves black communities to united against the police who are experienced as an “occupying force,” that exemplifies the myth of “post-emancipation” as the police function as 21st Century field hands and slave catchers. Only without the police would a free society be possible.
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Thesis Chapters by Ebony Rose
Drafts by Ebony Rose
these important conceptual lenses are essential for us to understand of the totality of all existence, life and/or/both death. By connecting biopower with necropower , I can attempt to unpack some of these questions : What does it mean to have black skin in a world governed by an advanced neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy? “What role do schools and other educational institutions play in an era where black bodies in urban cities are experiencing redundancy, surplus, disposability and dispossessed subjectivities?”
I want to focus on what I think the purpose of schooling is : the mass extermination and life management/optimization of all poor, female, queer, black life/bodies subjectivities. After I finished my thesis I begin exploring how a black social death is lived through a black social life and a black social life is lived though a black social death (Saxton, 2012). For me, black bodies are engaged and disengaged in a politics that is neither a pure form of life (let live, make life) or death (make death or let die), but a complex management of the two (Bhungalia, 2012). I will analyze this necro-bio dynamic as remains under/un-theorized, and unexamined in current education scholarship, thus, rendering black subjectivities obsolete. This leaves our analysis of contemporary forms of sovereignty in education. The necro-biopower collaboration has a home in critical/political/Marxist/Feminist/Black geography, Social theory and Black Studies but in radical/critical education scholarship only one scholar to date, Tyson E. Lewis (2006, 2010) has theorized concepts of Agamben, Foucault to coin biopedagogical and necropedagogical/thanatopedagogy (a pedagogy to end all education life).
This explains why education curriculum proposed by global finance, banking and educational organizations/institutions disrupt, disavow, exterminate, or murder indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, languages, ways of knowing, ways of being by positioning it as inferior knowledge production and primitive strategies for capital accumulation when compared to the West scientific and economic methods (Fals-Borda and Mora-Osejo, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Shizha, 2011; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2001; Wynter, 1994, 2006, 2006b). This epistemic genocide or “murder” in the words of Skutnabb-Kangas is how late-modernity/late capitalism/neo-colonialism/advance capitalism operates under the languages and economic policies of “neoliberal-globalization (Rizvi and Lingard) that seeks to promote and English only education that values the Western methods to address and solve issues resources scarcity, economic development and process, cultural deficiencies, and technological modernization (Barua, 2011). Therefore, this education curriculum, is anti-black, anti-native, anti- Indigenous anti-global poor, and thereby anti human. The curriculum promoted by the IMF and World Bank produces discourses and policies that always give evidence supporting the proposition that the West is the basis for the universal economic human subject and the East and Global South lack these essential characteristics.
In this paper, I will read the class text from weeks seven through thirteenth as examples of “southern theory” (Connell, 2007). The text will be used as evidence to argue that the present description of what it is to be human is being contested and struggled over by the global poor and Indigenous communities. Through their resistance, members of the global south now challenge our notion that Man is the only proper way of understanding the world. Their struggles over curricula, knowledges, and ways of being offers empirical evidence “the human” is always plural and always an emerging process. Through Sylvia Wynter’s writing, I will be able to offer an alternative conception of the human (Freire, and Fanon too!!) that builds on current critiques of man (the class text) therefore opening radical possibilities to bring a closure to the West and experiment with re-imaging alternatives to hegemonic descriptive statement of the human!
Conference Presentations by Ebony Rose
Papers by Ebony Rose
Books by Ebony Rose
these important conceptual lenses are essential for us to understand of the totality of all existence, life and/or/both death. By connecting biopower with necropower , I can attempt to unpack some of these questions : What does it mean to have black skin in a world governed by an advanced neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy? “What role do schools and other educational institutions play in an era where black bodies in urban cities are experiencing redundancy, surplus, disposability and dispossessed subjectivities?”
I want to focus on what I think the purpose of schooling is : the mass extermination and life management/optimization of all poor, female, queer, black life/bodies subjectivities. After I finished my thesis I begin exploring how a black social death is lived through a black social life and a black social life is lived though a black social death (Saxton, 2012). For me, black bodies are engaged and disengaged in a politics that is neither a pure form of life (let live, make life) or death (make death or let die), but a complex management of the two (Bhungalia, 2012). I will analyze this necro-bio dynamic as remains under/un-theorized, and unexamined in current education scholarship, thus, rendering black subjectivities obsolete. This leaves our analysis of contemporary forms of sovereignty in education. The necro-biopower collaboration has a home in critical/political/Marxist/Feminist/Black geography, Social theory and Black Studies but in radical/critical education scholarship only one scholar to date, Tyson E. Lewis (2006, 2010) has theorized concepts of Agamben, Foucault to coin biopedagogical and necropedagogical/thanatopedagogy (a pedagogy to end all education life).
This explains why education curriculum proposed by global finance, banking and educational organizations/institutions disrupt, disavow, exterminate, or murder indigenous knowledge systems, cultures, languages, ways of knowing, ways of being by positioning it as inferior knowledge production and primitive strategies for capital accumulation when compared to the West scientific and economic methods (Fals-Borda and Mora-Osejo, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Shizha, 2011; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2001; Wynter, 1994, 2006, 2006b). This epistemic genocide or “murder” in the words of Skutnabb-Kangas is how late-modernity/late capitalism/neo-colonialism/advance capitalism operates under the languages and economic policies of “neoliberal-globalization (Rizvi and Lingard) that seeks to promote and English only education that values the Western methods to address and solve issues resources scarcity, economic development and process, cultural deficiencies, and technological modernization (Barua, 2011). Therefore, this education curriculum, is anti-black, anti-native, anti- Indigenous anti-global poor, and thereby anti human. The curriculum promoted by the IMF and World Bank produces discourses and policies that always give evidence supporting the proposition that the West is the basis for the universal economic human subject and the East and Global South lack these essential characteristics.
In this paper, I will read the class text from weeks seven through thirteenth as examples of “southern theory” (Connell, 2007). The text will be used as evidence to argue that the present description of what it is to be human is being contested and struggled over by the global poor and Indigenous communities. Through their resistance, members of the global south now challenge our notion that Man is the only proper way of understanding the world. Their struggles over curricula, knowledges, and ways of being offers empirical evidence “the human” is always plural and always an emerging process. Through Sylvia Wynter’s writing, I will be able to offer an alternative conception of the human (Freire, and Fanon too!!) that builds on current critiques of man (the class text) therefore opening radical possibilities to bring a closure to the West and experiment with re-imaging alternatives to hegemonic descriptive statement of the human!