Counterpedagogies of Cruelty Across Abya Yala: A Move With Otherwise Present-Futurities

• In Event: Inter-Epistemic Dialogues With Decolonial Thought and Praxis From Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper centers three spaces and moments of contestation across different nation states–a bathroom stall in Chile, a sign on a construction vehicle in Guatemala, and the stone at a university in the United States–to expose overlapping colonialities, violences, racialized border logics, and movements toward an “otherwise.” To do so, we bring together Rita Segato’s (2018) concepts of pedagogies and counter-pedagogies of cruelty with settler colonialism, decolonial feminisms, and geographies.

In her work on gender-based violence, Segato (2018) maps the structures of patriarchal colonial hierarchies and violence, which teach us to diminish life and reduce empathy for the suffering of others. Segato (2018) describes “pedagogies of cruelty” as “ acts and practices that teach, habituate, and program subjects to transmute living beings and their vitality into things” (p. 11, author translation), while “counter-pedagogies of cruelty” are creatively disobedient acts that disrupt and refuse the flows of power and violence under patriarchal modern/colonial capitalism.
Bringing Segato’s (2018) concept of counter-pedagogies of cruelty together with settler colonialism and decolonial feminisms and geographies (e.g., Lugones 2010; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012; Segato, 2013; McKittrick, 2006, 2011; Gilmore, 2018; Daigle & Ramírez, 2019; Speed, 2019; King, 2019) puts into motion and makes visible the ongoing colonial structures, practices, and resistances across Abya Yala. This inter-epistemic feminist lens allows us to look at how the narrative of “the other” is employed, maintained, and connected to racialized capitalist-imperialist logics of land extraction, genocide, and violence across borders. These frameworks also push us to center an ‘otherwise’ no longer beholden to modern/colonial frameworks as a future already present and past, that challenges neoliberal colonial temporalities and attends to the ways borders and the gratuitous nature of modern/colonial violences permeate schools and classrooms and the urgency of these disruptions.

This paper embodies our shared inquiry and commitments with communities and onto-epistemologies that continue to be marginalized within and outside academic institutions’ walls. Working across epistemic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries (Author 1 in Chile, Author 2 in Guatemala, and both authors in the United States), the work we present here is a dialogue between two scholars and draws on our ethnographic, (re)memory, and autoethnographic research.

Ultimately, this paper makes visible the hauntings of colonial technologies of cruelty that move across time and space and are embedded in everyday pedagogies and engagements. This paper demonstrates how pedagogies of cruelty are ever-present in the extractive machines cracking open the land, drying rivers, and life; in the violence exacted against women’s bodies and documented in bathroom stalls; and in the historical markers on stolen land that reinforce and sanitize white settler theft of and claims to land and knowledge. At the same time, we show how youth and communities in resistance regularly disrupt these flows of power and violence through counter-pedagogies that push back on these spaces of concentrated colonial violence (schools, universities, and machinery of extraction), transform space, and call for seeing land, bodies, water, and education as interconnected sites of decolonial and abolitionist resistance and possibility.

Authors

• Romina Stephanie Peña-Pincheira, Gustavus Adolphus College
  Presenting Author

• Alexandra Allweiss, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author