"Bruti, Sporchi & Cativi": Toward a Nonabyssal Curriculum

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Globalizing Policies: Standardization in an Increasingly Nonstandardized World

Abstract

For all practical purposes, the Western Cartesian modernity model—a hegemonic model with its arrogant claim to address global social issues—is not just moribund; it is dead. Modernity was/is a ‘misleading dream’. Modernity’s final sentence was determined partially by modernity itself, and its truly totalitarian cult, a cultural and economic napalm that attempted to erase all other epistemological manifestations paradoxically ended up being systematically reinforced and strengthened from the belligerent clashes with modernity.

If colonialism is a crime against humanity, and colonialism and imperialism have no existence outside of modernity, then modernity is also not innocent in such a crime against humanity. This is not because it was inconsequential in avoiding/thwarting genocidal policies and practices, but precisely because it’s very existence relies on its capacity to perpetuate massive genocide. History is not absolving, and it will not absolve, the Western Cartesian modernity model. Great achievements in areas, such as space conquest and technologies have been reduced to a pale inconsequentiality for the massive majority of the world’s population in face of slavery, genocide, holocaust, poverty, inequality, social and cognitive apartheid, intergenerational injustice, and the temerity to change nature, among other issues. Painfully, all of these sagas are at the very root of such modern societal tech advancements.

To rely on Eagleton’s (2003) metaphor “it seems that God was not [modern]” (p. 1), and the twentieth century was the last Eurocentric century. Echoing Ettore Scola metaphor “Bruti, Sporchi & Cativi”, this paper challenges how hegemonic and specific (or so called) counter hegemonic curriculum platforms – so connected with Western Eurocentric Modernity - have been able to colonize the field without any prudency to “fabricate” and impose a classed, raced and gendered philosophy of praxis, as unique, that drives the field to an ideological surrealism and collective suicide. Such collective suicide framed by a theoretical timesharing unleashed by both dominant and specific counter dominant platforms that tenaciously controlled the circuits of cultural production grooms the field as a ghetto, flooded with rudeness, and miserable ambitions, a theoretical caliphate that wipes out any episteme beyond the Western Eurocentric Modern terrain, insolently droving to sewage of society the needs and desires of students, teachers and the community.

Drawing from key decolonial thinkers, this paper examines the way Western eugenic curriculum of modernity created an abyssal thinking in which ‘this side’ of the line is legitimate and ‘the other side’ has been produced as ‘non-existent’ (Sousa Santos, 2007). The paper suggests the need to move a post-abyssal curriculum that challenges dominant and counter dominant traditions within ‘this side’ of the line, and respects ‘the other’ side of the line. The paper challenges curriculum studies to assume a non-abyssal position one that respects epistemological diversity. This requires an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva, 2011), which is a commitment and a ruthless epistemological critique of every existing epistemology.

Author

• João Menelau Paraskeva, University of Massachusetts