Black Homes/White Schools: Matter, Movement, and Affective Spaces in Children's Consciousness of Race and Nation in Colonial Mozambique, 1934–1975

• In Event: 26.031 - Oppression and Resistance in Radicalized Educational Settings

Abstract

In this paper, I explore children’s sense of belonging, solidarity and exclusion in their communities and schools as an occasion to examine how epistemological, political, cultural, social and spatial boundaries (Anzaldua 1987) influenced children’s embodied consciousness of race, class and sense of “Portugalness” and “Mozambicannness” in colonial Mozambique (1934-1975). I am interested in Mozambicans’ memories of how they learned where the border(s) between “us” and “them” existed, who constituted “us” and “them,” who might be considered an ally with whom to join forces in solidarity despite perceptions of difference, and how did colonial spatialization, “the process of ‘positioning’, of ‘placing’ things and bodies which then constitute a specific space”(Reckwitz 2012, 252) influenced these embodied experiences.

Author

• Antoinette Errante, The Ohio State University