Interrogated Histories, Liberated Identities, and Interrupted Power

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Histories, journeys, and social issues: decolonizing African education

Proposal

Are we willing to allow other voices and perspectives to not only shape our thinking, but to disrupt our current paths, challenge our perspectives, and disrupt our methods? To answer this question, we must be willing to discuss the issues of power through an analysis of history and the social constructs that have created binaries or categories. When these constructs, binaries, and categories have political, cultural, social, and economic rewards and consequences, we must ask ourselves what the perpetuation says about what we have decided to maintain and how the disruption might lead to expanded truths and liberation.

As part of a Fulbright research team, I journeyed to Ethiopia in July of 2016. With the aim of developing a shared curriculum with university professors and teachers affiliated with Wolaita Sodo University, eighteen Americans of varying racial, cultural, ethnic, and professional backgrounds sought to better understand how to teach African-centered curricula within an American context. We sought to decolonize the language and practices that perpetuated the narrow understanding held by most American students relative to the history and current climate within Ethiopia, as a model of doing the same as it related to the African continent.

As an African-American of Gullah Geechee heritage, I have largely relied upon the institution of family to learn of and understand the influence, both historic and current, of that culture on American life. Standard primary and secondary education has, with difficulty and limited success, broached the subjects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and done very little to explore the histories of African nations. After natural migratory patterns, colonialism has played a critical part in shaping the current sociopolitical climates that currently exist. In order to understand the modern day Africa, one must understand the influence of colonization.

How might we interrogate our constructed identities? How might we interrogate the systemic practices and structural institutions that perpetuate the muting of what has been ‘othered’ or assigned values between ‘this’ and ‘that’?

In Ethiopia, we learned and discussed the importance of the unification efforts that thwarted the efforts of an Italian invasion. This brought about an awareness of how variations of the flag of Ethiopia have been adopted as countries within the African continent have gained their independence. In Haiti, there was Tousain’t L’Ouverture which were followed by revolts in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1822 and Jamaica in 1832. The Mende people of Sierra Leone took control of the Amistad in 1839. These stories of resistance, offer a wider perspective of the experience of the members of the African Diaspora within a larger sociopolitical context. What might we learn from understanding other stories of the colonial world? What might we learn if we grapple with a broader and deeper truth that interrogates power? How might we, in the American context, provide a broader understanding of the experiences and histories of Africans and African nations?

How might we grapple with our inextricably tied histories so that we liberate each other?

Authors

• Derric Ivan Heck, University of Pittsburgh

• Maureen K Porter, University of Pittsburgh