Race, Place, And Praxis: Shock Doctrine Schooling In Honduras And The Decolonial Pedagogy Of Garifuna En Peligro
doi.org/10.31641/XSSJ2662
Verónica Brownstone
Wesleyan UniversityPublication
Abstract
In Honduras and across Central America, education has long played a decisive role in both reactionary and revolutionary moments where new ideologies, social relations, and apparatuses destabilize older ones. In the aftermath of 2009 ousting of left-wing President Manuel Zelaya, Honduran schools became a key site of resistance in the anti-coup movement. Meanwhile, the increasing marketization of public education was entirely unprecedented. This article argues that Honduras’s experiment in shock doctrine schooling imported the American charter model to advance a free-market agenda predicated on the renewed disempowerment of racialized and poor communities. It then turns to Allí Allié and Rubén Reyes’ Garifuna en peligro (2012), a Honduran-American film produced at the height of these postcoup reforms, to examine the labor required to undermine neoliberal education. The pedagogical model depicted in the film strives towards an analytic and a praxis that refuses the modern-Western reason of neoliberal education structures and curricula. The article concludes by expanding discussions on decolonial pedagogy to account for its strategic proximity to racial capitalist logics that favor representation, citizenship, sovereignty, and rights, which achieve inclusion in the state, but not necessarily decolonization.
Key Words
Education and neoliberalism, decolonial pedagogy, Blackness and Indigeneity, postcoup Honduras, Honduran cinema
