One for All/All for One: National Curricular Policies and (Im)Possibilities of Differing

• In Event: 43.080 - Sheraton Roundtable Six - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 43.080-6 - Differing Differences: Transnational Curriculum Spaces and Inquiries in Post-Truth Times

Abstract

Purpose: The aim of this work is to discuss how the contemporary productions of curricular policies in Brazil, referred to as “national,” function as attempts of regulation and control, and thus expel “difference.” The use of the “national” signifier is problematized as a marker that emphasizes the naturalized organization of diversities in favor of “the common” to and of all. What possibilities of differentiation are constituted and stagnated by the production, as Bhabha (1994) says, of “many as one?”

Theoretical framework: The paper is grounded in postcolonial and poststructural contributions, especially those of Bhabha (1994, 2003). Thus, “national identity” is posited as an invented tradition. Bhabha (2003) discusses the nation as a narration, which evidences that the Nation-state is not based on essentialisms and primordialisms, but rather is a cultural product. It arises within the tension between the pedagogical - which is based on assumptions of continuity, of a cumulative temporality, of a homogenized universal national project - and the performative, an iterative dimension. The national is rubbed out, as the dialogue between Derrida (2004) and Bhabha demonstrates: the delimiting and fixed border is erased, and boundaries are always presence/absence. Drawing from Bhabha’s interrogations, I ask: how might we attend to effects of cohesion/regulation in contexts of curriculum local production as well as to ambivalences that destabilize a pretension of national homogeneity?

Mode of inquiry: In dialogue with Laclau (2007) and Bhabha (1994), I interrogate Brazilian curriculum policy research by employing a discursive perspective. I analyze specific policy productions as well as their discursive articulations as forms of political signification.

Data: Data include the texts of curricular policies, laws and opinions that have been produced through political processes. My analyses of research data highlights ways that discursive articulations work in major ways to construct the senses of “national” as embodying efforts toward equality, equity and social justice. The curriculum policies invent a concept of “unified” that characterizes “national.” Such a construction erases differences, antagonisms and incommensurabilities, and replaces all these with a single version of “national” as equating with and requiring sameness. “Difference” appears in the analyzed policies in the forms and functions of what Derrida (1992) calls “sameness” or, in terms of the document, “equity.” However, as Derrida also teaches us, it is not possible to totally control the difference – it appears and is created as well in the flow of curricular utterances.

Conclusion and Significance: Thus, in these Brazilian policy documents aimed toward establishing and normalizing a “common core,” the construct of “national” does not account for what, in Bhabha’s terms, is the “meanwhile” -- a succession without synchrony, an ambivalence that highlights liminality and the possibilities of differing. Even if normativity does not normalize everything and everyone, even if it does not make “the many” as “the one,” it still does normalize to greater or lesser extents. It still erases. That is why deconstructive studies like this one function as responsible political action.

Author

• Rita de Cássia Frangella, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro