A Rogue Curriculum: Transatlantic, Creole Pedagogies and Historical Imagination

• In Event: 34.023 - Curriculum History as Memory Work: Deterritorializing the Field

Abstract

The research articulated in this paper takes up the work of Henri Lefebvre to envision curriculum history as a spatialized practice of ethical engagement with alterity. For LeFebre, history is lived through spatial codes or systems of space, that are produced through relationships and interactions. While the linguistic turn in curriculum history situated the “subject” in language, this paper maintains that it is time and space that have remained constant and under-analyzed. History has traditionally been conceptualized within Absolute space, understood as a geometrical concept, simply that of an empty area. The work of Lefebvre (1974) in The Production of Space, is particularly insightful in rendering space, not a mathematical concept, but a “social space.” According to Lefebvre “physical space has no “reality” without the energy that is deployed within it” (p. 13). Rejecting a “simple expanding universe,” Lefebvre proposes a much more complex theory in which energy travels in every direction. From this view, “a single centre of the universe, whether, original or final, is inconceivable. Energy-space-time condenses at an indefinite number of points (local space-times)” (p. 13). This complexity of space makes historical representation impossible. Alternatively, curriculum history can be understood as a relational space or matrix in suspended in a web of relationships so interconnected that the boundaries, categories, and monuments of modernism are made unintelligible. This requires reading and interpreting history through space and time to look for connections and ruptures as opposed to reading for “progress.” History as space, is an ethics of relationship, in which we engage with the past not to re-present it but to engage in the connectivity of complex relationships in which we are always/already inherently woven.
Specifically, this paper explores three spaces in which ethics produce and are produced by space. The first is the space of a “transatlantic, creole pedagogical circuit” through which I read the “commons” produced in the common school movement, the normative trope of curriculum history in the United States, specifically in relation to reverberations of the Haitian Revolution. The second, is the space of “public rights,” as articulated in the 1868 Louisiana Constitution, produced within what I call a “transatlantic protest tradition,” as distinct from Habermas’ public sphere. The third is the space created in New Orleans streets as walked by Homer Plessy and Paul Trévigne as a “wandering of the semantic.” These multilayered spaces make visible the the conscripts of modernity (the nation state, citizenship, education), unleashing curriculum history from the tropes of monumental history. A Rogue curriculum, as a spatial practice, invokes historical imagination in order to embrace historical inquiry as a dynamic engagement of ethical relationships.

Author

• Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University