Rethinking Paulo Freire and Postcolonialism in the Age of Disposability
Paulo Freire. Courtesy of Henry Giroux.
Reclaiming Freire
Across the globe, many societies deeply rooted in colonial practices and systemic racism are once again invoking the dehumanizing language of colonial oppression to justify exclusion and violence. In France, leaders vilify refugees as threats to national identity, perpetuating fear and division. Israel labels Palestinians with terms that strip them of humanity and engages in a wholesale slaughter of women and children. Similarly, in the United States, Trump has referred to immigrants as “poisoning the blood of Americans,” reviving a dangerous xenophobic trope reminiscent of past atrocities while claiming he will deport 20 million undocumented immigrants.[1] These examples underscore how the pejorative language of colonialism and authoritarianism is being weaponized today in order to expand and sustain systems of war, inequality, repression, and fascist modes of governance. We live in an age when genocide is legitimated through the language of dehumanization, a culture of lies and the erasure of history and culture.
In this context, Paulo Freire’s work takes on an extraordinary and urgent relevance. His revolutionary pedagogy provides a powerful framework for dismantling the ideologies that sustain colonialism and systemic oppression. [2] It empowers individuals to critically interrogate and resist the narratives that dehumanize, silence, and perpetuate inequality. As global politics increasingly embrace the hallmarks of fascist ideology—ranging from racial cleansing and ultranationalism to violence against marginalized groups and a ferocious disdain for public goods—Freire’s vision of education as both a form of resistance and a horizon of possibility becomes indispensable. His work challenges us to see education not merely as a tool for learning but as a practice of freedom, fostering critical agency and collective action in the struggle for justice and democracy.
Freire’s work remains a cornerstone for progressive educators, especially at a time when faculty are being fired for critical views, students protesting Israel’s war crimes are beaten, jailed, and subject “to surveillance, reprisals, and expulsions.”[3] It gets worse, increasingly and aggressively the far-right is transforming higher education into indoctrination centers for white Christian nationalism.[4] Freire’s name has become synonymous with critical pedagogy, which is increasingly understood as both a moral and political project for teaching critical thinking, dialogical engagement, and critical literacy. For Freire, education and literacy were revolutionary tools for developing an anti-capitalist consciousness. However, as Freire’s work traveled from Brazil to Latin America, Africa, and the hybrid cultural borderlands of North America, it was and has often been appropriated in ways that dilute its radical essence. Too frequently, his ideas are reduced to pedagogical techniques divorced from their revolutionary roots, neutralized into depoliticized methods that fail to address their anti-colonial and postcolonial foundations.[5] As Stanley Aronowitz notes, what is conveniently forgotten in this approach is that Freire saw the chief function of education as repression and he wanted to “establish an egalitarian education system as a vital aspect of the society he wished to bring about.”[6]
Such appropriations are not benign. The North American tendency to invoke Freire’s work as “politically charged” or “problem-posing” too often contradicts its revolutionary intent, turning his legacy into a collection of abstracted labels detached from concrete struggles.[7] This process strips Freire’s pedagogy of its transformative power, relegating it to a bland repertoire of techniques that reinforce, rather than challenge, the systems of privilege and power he sought to dismantle.
But in such a context, these are terms that speak less to a political project constructed amidst concrete struggles than they do to the insipid and dreary demands for pedagogical recipes dressed up in the jargon of abstracted progressive labels. What has been increasingly lost in the North American and Western appropriation of Freire’s work is the profound and radical nature of its theory and practice as an anti-colonial and postcolonial discourse. More specifically, Freire’s work is often appropriated and taught “without any consideration of imperialism and its cultural representation.” [8] This suggests that Freire’s work has been appropriated in ways that denude it of some of its most important political insights. Similarly, it testifies to how certain pedagogical practices work in the interest of privilege and power to cross cultural, political, and textual borders so as to deny the specificity of the other and to reimpose the discourse and practice of cultural imperialism.
Freire’s work must instead be reclaimed as a profoundly postcolonial text, one that demands a radical form of border-crossing, especially from North American educators and intellectuals. This involves confronting the privileges and ideologies rooted in the West and interrogating how these positions shape interpretations of Freire’s ideas. To fully engage with Freire, one must move beyond the comfort of Western perspectives and reconstruct his work within the specificity of its historical and political origins. This requires creating spaces for meaningful dialogue where dominant social relations, ideologies, and practices that erase the voices of the oppressed are actively challenged and dismantled.
Academics as Border Crossers
In order to understand the work of Paulo Freire in terms of its historical and political importance, it is necessary to explore what it means for academics and other cultural workers to become border-crossers. This means that teachers and other intellectuals have to take leave of the cultural, theoretical, and ideological borders that enclose him or her within the safety of “those places and spaces we inherit and occupy, which frame our lives in very specific and concrete ways.” [9] Being a border-crosser also suggests that one has to reinvent traditions not within the discourse of submission, reverence, and repetition, but “as transformation and critique. [That is]…one must construct one’s discourse as difference in relation to that tradition and this implies at the same time continuities and discontinuities.”[10] As a border-crosser, academics must forsake limiting their scholarship to the boundaries of their disciplines. Any serious analysis, for example, of the war crimes, genocide, and atrocities taking place throughout the globe demands “an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates insights from a multitude of areas of expertise including law, history, politics, hard and applied sciences, psychology, journalism and others. Universities are crucial to supporting the evidence-based research needed to do this essential work.”[11]
Of course, at a time when the mission of higher education and its classroom priorities are being defined by far-right billionaires, it is more difficult for educators to take on the role of border crossing, because it is historical, critical, interdisciplinary, and holds power accountable. Under the upcoming Trump administration, the spaces for translation, academic freedom, and critique will become more limited and dangerous.
Vichy Academics in Trump Land
As American society increasingly aligns with a fascist administration, the conservative nature of its cultural and political structures emboldens what can be described as “Vichy academics.” These individuals now have free rein to denounce scholars who engage with social issues, connect their work to broader political and ethical concerns, or recognize pedagogy and classrooms as profoundly political spaces—sites where agency, values, and students’ understandings of themselves, others, and the larger world are actively shaped. Cloaking themselves in neutrality, these academics align with the neoliberal university, often driven by personal quests for power and rewards, while hypocritically insisting that there is no room for politics in higher education.
One egregious example of this delusional and self-righteous stance can be found in recent essays by William Deresiewicz and Michael W. Clune. Clune, in particular, has gone so far as to claim that “the spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to address climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.” [12] This position is not only deeply flawed but also complicit in the broader project of erasing critical ideas, books, and liberal faculty from education—a project that serves to maintain oppressive systems of power by presenting classrooms as apolitical spaces. The call for neutrality among many universities in North America is a retreat from social and moral responsibility. It is also a false claim since universities are steeped in power relations both within these institutions and in relation to broader interests. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta are worth repeating on this issue. They write:
Institutional neutrality serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate. It obscures the fact that virtually every activity conducted in universities is political, from decisions regarding who is permitted to enroll to which research gets funding to policies on holding events and putting up posters. Small and large decisions by university administrators inevitably involve political choices.[13]
Intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, Stanley Aronowitz, and Ellen Willis have long recognized the dangers of this supposed neutrality in education. Edward Said, one of the most prominent and courageous public intellectuals of our time, was particularly forceful in rejecting the idea that classrooms could—or should—be void of values and politics in the pursuit of objectivity. Said argued that the classroom is an inherently political site and condemned academics who pretend otherwise. He rightly described those who espouse such apolitical fantasies as “reprehensible,” exposing their claims as both intellectually dishonest and politically complicit in maintaining the status quo:
Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.’[14]
Home, Exiles, and Border Crossing
Border-crossing engages intellectual work as part of the discourse of invention and construction, rather than a discourse of recognition whose aim is reduced to revealing and transmitting universal truths. In this case, it is important to highlight intellectual work as being forged in the intersection of contingency and history arising not from the “exclusive hunting grounds of an elite [but] from all points of the social fabric.”[15] What is often ignored in the call for objectivity and classroom free from politics are pedagogical practices that provide the conditions to get students to think critically, reflect on what knowledge is of most worth, how their identities are being shaped within particular relations of power, and learn how to hold power and assigned meanings accountable. There is also a larger challenge here that is crucial to protecting higher education as a public good and democratizing institution. Toni Morrison states it clearly. She writes: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.” [16]
This task becomes all the more difficult with Paulo Freire because the borders that define his work have shifted over time in ways that parallel his own exile and movement from Brazil to Chile, Mexico, the United States, Geneva, and back to Brazil. Freire’s work not only draws heavily upon European discourses, but also upon the thought and language of theorists in Latin America, Africa, and North America. Freire’s ongoing political project raises enormous difficulties for educators who situate Freire’s work in the reified language of methodologies and in empty calls that enshrine the practical at the expense of the theoretical and political.
Freire is an exile for whom being home is often tantamount to being “homeless” and for whom his own identity and the identities of Others are viewed as sites of struggle over the politics of representation, the exercise of power, and the function of social memory. [17] It is important to note that the concept of “home” being used here does not refer exclusively to those places in which one sleeps, eats, raises children and sustains a certain level of comfort. For some, this particular notion of “home” is too mythic, especially for those who literally have no home in this sense; it also becomes a reification when it signifies a place of safety which excludes the lives, identities, and experiences of the Other, that is, when it becomes synonymous with the cultural capital of White, middle-class subjects.
“Home”, in the sense I am using it, suggests a “critical de-essentializing gesture.” It refers to the cultural, social, and political boundaries that demarcate varying spaces of comfort, suffering, abuse, and security that define an individual or group’s location and positionality. To move away from “home” is to question in historical, semiotic, and structural terms how the boundaries and meanings of “home” are often constructed beyond the discourse of criticism. “Home” is about those cultural spaces and social formations which work as sites of domination and resistance. In the first instance, “home” is safe by virtue of its repressive exclusions and privileged location of individuals and groups outside of the flux of history, power, and ethics. In the second case, home becomes a form of “homelessness”, a shifting site of identity, resistance, and opposition that enables conditions of self and social formation. JanMohammed captures this distinction quite lucidly.
“Home” comes to be associated with “culture” as an environment, process, and hegemony that determine individuals through complicated mechanisms. Culture is productive of the necessary sense of belonging, of “home”; it attempts to suture…collective and individual subjectivity. But culture is also divisive, producing boundaries that distinguish the collectivity and what lies outside it and that define hierarchic organizations with in the collectivity. “Homelessness”, on the other hand, is ….an enabling concept…associated with…the civil and political space that hegemony cannot suture, a space in which “alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project can survive. “Homelessness,” then, is a situation wherein utopian potentiality can endure. [18]
For Freire, the task of being an intellectual has always been forged within the trope of homelessness: between different zones of theoretical and cultural difference; between the borders of non-European and European cultures. In effect, Freire is a border intellectual whose allegiance has not been to a specific class and culture as in Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual; instead, Freire’s writings embody a mode of discursive struggle and opposition that not only challenges the oppressive machinery of the State but is also sympathetic to the formation of new cultural subjects and movements engaged in the struggle over the modernist values of freedom, equality, and justice. In part, this explains Freire’s interest for educators, feminists, and revolutionaries in Africa, Latin America, and South Africa.
As a border intellectual, Paulo Freire disrupts the divide between individual identity and collective subjectivity, making visible a politics that intertwines human suffering with the transformative project of possibility. For Freire, this is not a detached descent into disembodied textuality but an insurgent literacy born in the crucible of political and material dislocations—those inflicted by regimes that exploit, oppress, expel, and devastate human lives. Freire’s work inhabits a terrain of “homelessness,” not as mere exile but as a radical refusal of ideological and hegemonic closure. His vision embraces the endless tensions, contradictions, and reconstructions that shape identity and animate the struggle for justice.
This sense of “homelessness” is not despairing but generative, a continual crossing into the terrains of Otherness. It is here, in the liminal spaces where identities and histories collide, that Freire’s life and work take root. As an exile, a border-being, he occupies the interstices of culture, epistemology, and geography, embodying a politics of location that is always in motion. Freire’s border-crossing is not just a metaphor but a method, a way of engaging the world that defies boundaries and dares to imagine new ways of being, knowing, and resisting.
It is to Freire’s credit as a critical educator and cultural worker that he has always been extremely conscious about the intentions, goals, and effects of crossing borders and how such movements offer the opportunity for new subject positions, identities, and social relations that can produce resistance to and relief from the structures of domination and oppression. While such an insight has continuously invested his work with a healthy “restlessness,” it has not meant that Freire’s work has developed unproblematically. For example, Freire’s incessant attempts to construct a new language, produce new spaces of resistance, imagine new ends and opportunities to reach them were sometimes constrained, especially in his early work, in totalizing narratives and binarisms that de-emphasized the mutually contradictory and multiple character of domination and struggle. In this sense, Freire’s earlier reliance on emancipation as the same with class struggle sometimes erased how women were subjected differently to patriarchal structures; similarly, his call for members of the dominating groups to commit class suicide downplayed the complex, multiple, and contradictory nature of human subjectivity. Finally, Freire’s reference to the “masses” or oppressed as being inscribed in a culture of silence appeared to be at odds with both the varied forms of domination these groups labored under and Freire’s own belief in the diverse ways in which the oppressed struggle and manifest elements of practical and political agency. While it is crucial to acknowledge the theoretical and political brilliance that informed much of this work, it is also necessary to recognize that it bore slight traces of vanguardism. This is evident not only in the binarism that inform Pedagogy of the Oppressed but also in Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, particularly in those sections where Freire argues that the culture of the masses must develop on the basis of science and that emancipatory pedagogy must be aligned with the struggle for national reconstruction.
Without adequately addressing the contradictions these issues raise between the objectives of the state, the discourse of everyday life, and the potential for pedagogical violence being done in the name of political correctness, Freire’s work is open to the charge made by some leftist theorists of being overly totalizing. But this can be read less as a reductive critique of Freire’s work than as an indication of the need to subject it and all forms of social criticism to analyses that engage its strengths and limitations as part of a wider dialogue in the service of an emancipatory politics.
The contradictions raised in Freire’s work offer a number of questions that need to be addressed by critical educators about not only Freire’s earlier writing but also about their own. For instance, what happens when the language of the educator is different from that of students or subordinate groups? How is it possible to be vigilant against taking up a notion of language, politics, and rationality that undermines recognizing one’s own partiality and the voices and experiences of Others? How does one explore the contradiction between validating certain forms of “correct” thinking and the pedagogical task of helping students assume rather than simply follow the dictates of authority, regardless of how radical the project informed by such authority. Of course, it cannot be forgotten that the strength of Freire’s early work rests, in part, with its making visible not merely the ideological struggle against domination and colonialism but also the material substance of human suffering, pain, and imperialism. Forged in the heat of life and death struggles, Freire’s use of binarisms such as the oppressed vs. the oppressor, problem-solving vs. problem-posing, science vs. magic, raged bravely against dominant languages and configurations of power that refused to address their own politics by appealing to the imperatives of politeness, objectivity, and neutrality. Here Freire strides the boundary between modernist and anti-colonialist discourse; he struggles against colonialism, but in doing so he often reverses rather than ruptures its basic problematic. Benita Parry locates a similar problem in the work of Frantz Fanon: “What happens is that heterogeneity is repressed in the monolithic figures and stereotypes of colonialist representations….[But] the founding concepts of the problematic must be refused.” [19]
In his later work, particularly in his work with Donaldo Macedo, in his numerous interviews, and in his talking books with authors such as Ira Shor, Antonio Faundez, and Myles Horton, Freire undertakes a form of social criticism and cultural politics that pushes against those boundaries that invoke the discourse of the unified, humanist subject, universal historical agents, and Enlightenment rationality.[20] Refusing the privilege of home as a border intellectual situated in the shifting and ever- changing universe of struggle, Freire invokes and constructs elements of a social criticism that shares an affinity with emancipatory strands of a number of critical theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and C. Wright Mills. [21] That is, in his refusal of a transcendent ethics, epistemological foundationalism, and political teleology, he further develops a provisional ethical and political discourse subject to the play of history, culture, and power.
As a border crossing intellectual, he constantly re-examines and raises questions about what kind of borders are being crossed and revisited, what kind of identities are being remade and refigured within new historical, social, and political borderlands, and what effects such crossings have for redefining pedagogical practice. For Freire, pedagogy is seen as a cultural practice and politics that takes place not only in schools but in all cultural spheres. In this instance, all cultural work is pedagogical and cultural workers inhabit a number of sites that include but are not limited to schools. In a dialogue with Antonio Faundez, Freire talks about his own self-formation as an exile and border-crosser. He writes:
It was by travelling all over the world, it was by travelling through Africa, it was by travelling through Asia, through Australia and New Zealand, and through the islands of the South Pacific, it was by travelling through the whole of Latin America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe-it was by passing through all these different parts of the world as an exile that I came to understand my own country better. It was by seeing it from a distance, it was by standing back from it, that I came to understand myself better. It was by being confronted with another self that I discovered more easily my own identity. And thus I overcame the risk which exiles sometimes run of being too remote in their work as intellectuals from the most real, most concrete experiences, and of being somewhat lost, and even somewhat contented, because they are lost in a game of words, what I usually rather humorously call “specializing in the ballet of concepts.” [22]
It is here that we get further indications of some of the principles that inform Freire as a revolutionary. It is in this work and his work with Donaldo Macedo, Ira Shor, Antonia Darder, Peter McLaren and others that we see traces, images, and representations of a political project that are inextricably linked to Freire’s own self-formation. It is here that Freire is at his most prescient in unraveling and dismantling ideologies and structures of domination as they emerge in his confrontation with the ongoing exigencies of daily life as manifested differently in the tensions, suffering, and hope between the diverse margins and centers of power that have come to characterize a postmodern/postcolonial world.
Reading Freire’s work for the last 20 or more years has drawn me closer to Adorno’s insight that, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”[23] Adorno was also an exile, raging against the horror and evil of another era, but he was also insistent that it was the role of intellectuals, in part, to challenge those places bounded by terror, exploitation, and human suffering. He also called for intellectuals to refuse and transgress those systems of standardization, commodification, and administration pressed into the service of an ideology and language of “home” that occupied or were complicitous with oppressive centers of power. Freire differs from Adorno in that there is a more profound sense of rupture, transgression, and hope, intellectually and politically, in his work. This is evident in his call for educators, social critics, and cultural workers to fashion a notion of politics and pedagogy outside of established disciplinary borders; outside of the division between high and popular culture; outside of “stable notions of self and identity…based on exclusion and secured by terror”;[24] outside of homogeneous public spheres; and outside of boundaries that separate desire from rationality, the body from the mind.
Of course, this is not to suggest that intellectuals have to go into exile to take up Freire’s work, but it does suggest that in becoming border-crossers, it is not uncommon for many of them to engage his work as an act of bad faith. Refusing to negotiate or deconstruct the borders that define their own politics of location, they have little sense of moving into an “imagined space,” a position from which they can unsettle, disrupt, and “illuminate that which is no longer home-like, heimlich, about one’s home.” [25]
From the comforting perspective of the colonizing gaze, such theorists often appropriate Freire’s work without engaging its historical specificity and ongoing political project. The gaze in this case becomes self-serving and self-referential, its principles shaped by technical and methodological considerations. Its perspective, in spite of itself, is largely “panoptic and thus dominating.”[26] To be sure, such intellectuals cross borders less as exiles than as colonialists. Hence, they often refuse to hold up to critical scrutiny their own complicity in producing and maintaining specific injustices, practices, and forms of oppression that deeply inscribe the legacy and heritage of colonialism. Edward Said captures the tension between exile and critic, home and “homelessness” in his comment on Adorno, though it is just as applicable to Paulo Freire:
To follow Adorno is to stand away from “home” in order to look at it with the exile’s detachment. For there is considerable merit in the practice of noting the discrepancies between various concepts and ideas and what they actually produce. We take home and language for granted; they become nature and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become prisons and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. [27]
Of course, intellectuals from the First World, especially white academics, run the risk of acting in bad faith when they appropriate the work of a Third World intellectual such as Paulo Freire without “mapping the politics of their forays into other cultures,” theoretical discourses, and historical experiences. [28] It is truly disconcerting that First World educators rarely articulate the politics and privileges of their own location so at the very least to be self-conscious about not repeating the type of appropriations that inform the legacy of what Said calls “Orientalist” scholarship.[29]
To conclude, it is crucial to reflect on what it might mean for cultural workers to resist the commodification of Freire’s work, ensuring it does not become merely an academic tool or a one-size-fits-all framework. At the same time, we must consider how to reimagine the radicality of Freire’s ideas within the context of postcolonial discourse, informed by Cornel West’s description of “the decolonization of the Third World, [and characterized by] the exercise of…agency and the [production of] new…subjectivities and identities put forward by those persons who had been degraded, devalued, hunted, and harassed, exploited and oppressed by the European maritime empires.”[30]
Freire’s insights, alongside the contributions of other postcolonial thinkers, open new theoretical possibilities to challenge the authority and discourses rooted in colonial legacies—practices that continue to shape social relations and sustain privilege and oppression as pervasive forces in both the centers and margins of power. Postcolonial discourses have made clear that the old legacies of the political left, center, and right can no longer be so easily defined. Indeed, postcolonial critics have gone further and provided important theoretical insights into how such discourses either actively construct colonial relations or are implicated in their construction. From this perspective, Robert Young argues that postcolonialism is a dislocating discourse that raises theoretical questions regarding how dominant and radical theories “have themselves been implicated in the long history of European colonialism-and, above all, the extent to which [they] continue to determine both the institutional conditions of knowledge as well as the terms of contemporary institutional practices-practices which extend beyond the limits of the academic institution.” [31]
This is especially true for many of the theorists in a variety of social movements who have taken up the language of difference and a concern for the politics of disposability, now in full force under the Trump administration. In many instances, theorists within these new social movements have addressed political and pedagogical issues through the construction of binary oppositions that not only contain traces of racism and theoretical vanguardism but also fall into the trap of simply reversing the old colonial legacy and problematic of oppressed vs. oppressor. In doing so, they have often unwittingly imitated the colonial model of erasing the complexity, complicity, diverse agents, and multiple situations that constitute the enclaves of colonial/hegemonic discourse and practice. [32]
Postcolonial discourses have both extended and moved beyond the parameters of this debate in a number of ways. First, postcolonial critics have argued that the history and politics of difference is often informed by a legacy of colonialism that warrants analyzing the historical contexts, exclusions and repressions that allow specific forms of privilege to remain unacknowledged in the language of Western educators and cultural workers.
At stake here is the task of demystifying and deconstructing forms of privilege that benefit maleness, whiteness, and property as well as those conditions that have disabled others to speak in places where those who are privileged by virtue of the legacy of colonial power assume authority and the conditions for human agency. This suggests, as Gayatri Spivak has pointed out, that more is at stake than problematizing discourse. More importantly, educators and cultural workers must be engaged in “the unlearning of one’s own privilege. So that, not only does one become able to listen to that other constituency, but one learns to speak in such a way that one will be taken seriously by that other constituency.” [33] In this instance, postcolonial discourse extends the radical implications of difference and location by making such concepts attentive to providing the grounds for forms of self-representation and collective knowledge in which the subject and object of European culture are problematized.[34]
Second, postcolonial discourse rewrites the relationship between the margin and the center by deconstructing the colonialist and imperialist ideologies that structure Western knowledge, texts, and social practices. In this case, there is an attempt to demonstrate how European culture and colonialism “are deeply implicated in each other.”[35] This suggests more than rewriting or recovering the repressed stories and social memories of the Other; it means understanding and rendering visible how Western knowledge is encased in historical and institutional structures that both privilege and exclude particular readings, particular voices, certain aesthetics, forms of authority, specific representations, and modes of sociality.
The relationship between the West and Otherness in postcolonial discourse is not one of simple polarities. Instead, it reflects a dynamic interplay in which both are simultaneously complicit and resistant, victim and accomplice. In this sense, critiques of the dominating Other also function as a form of self-criticism. Linda Hutcheon captures the complexity of this relationship with her provocative question: “How do we construct a discourse which displaces the effects of the colonizing gaze while we are still under its influence?”[36] This question underscores the difficulty of disentangling the legacy of colonialism—a legacy that includes not only cultural imperialism and ideological dominance but also large-scale death and destruction, as we see in real time in Gaza. Yet, it is equally crucial to recognize that the Other is not simply the opposite of Western colonialism, nor is the West a monolithic force of imperialism.
This understanding points to a third rupture made possible by postcolonial discourses. Postcolonial theory challenges the ideological convenience of Western intellectuals who often neglect to interrogate how notions of agency are shaped and distorted within oppressive systems of privilege and power. However, this does not imply a return to humanist conceptions of the subject as a unified or static identity. On the contrary, postcolonial discourse acknowledges the necessity of decentering the subject while resisting the wholesale dismissal of agency and social change.
In this context, agency must be reimagined as intersecting and dynamic, offering the possibility for action and transformation without relying on reductive or essentialist notions of identity. This reimagined agency demands an understanding of the strengths and limits of practical reason, the critical role of affective investments, and the use of ethics as a resource for envisioning social change. Furthermore, it highlights the availability of diverse discourses and cultural resources that form the foundation for struggling toward agency and creating the conditions necessary for informed, critical citizens capable of enacting transformative social action. [37]
Of course, while the burden of engaging these postcolonial concerns must be taken up by those who appropriate Freire’s work, it is also necessary for Freire to be more specific about the politics of his own location and what the discourses of postcolonialism mean for self-reflectively engaging both his own work and his current location as an intellectual aligned with the State. If Freire has the right to draw upon his own experiences, how do these get re-invented so as to prevent their incorporation by First World theorists within colonialist rather than decolonizing terms and practices?
In raising this question, it is vital to underscore that what makes Paulo Freire’s work so enduring is its refusal to stand still. Freire’s texts resist cultural monumentalism, offering themselves not as static relics but as dynamic, evolving frameworks for different readings, audiences, and contexts. His work invites us to think critically, not reverently, about education, power, and resistance. To fully grasp the depth of Freire’s contributions, one must read his work in its entirety, as it cannot be disentangled from its historical and postcolonial origins. Yet, it equally resists being reduced to its author’s intentions or its historical moment.
The power of Freire’s project lies in its poetic and political tensions—a borderland where identity and history converge to reclaim power through acts of rewriting and resistance. Freire’s pedagogy speaks to those who dare to cross borders, who read history as a living document of struggle and hope, and who envision education as a radical act of reclaiming the future. His work is not just a call to understand the world but to transform it, to imagine solidarity as a present action rooted in the past, reverberating into the future.
Today, Freire’s ideas resonate with particular urgency. As authoritarianism tightens its grip, as climate crises deepen, as refugees are displaced, and as systemic racism and rising fascism fracture societies, Freire’s vision of education as a site of resistance and transformation becomes indispensable. The attacks on his legacy, such as those by former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, underscore the revolutionary potency of his work. Such hostility is a testament to the threat Freire’s ideas pose to oppressive systems—a reminder of their radical potential to empower the marginalized and challenge class and racially entrenched hierarchies.
Freire’s work is an enduring invitation to navigate the liminal spaces of history, culture, and identity—to envision new forms of justice and freedom in the face of persistent oppression. It calls us to confront the enduring legacies of colonialism and to dismantle the systems that sustain inequality and dehumanization. Yet Freire also dares us to dream beyond resistance, imagining a future where solidarity and emancipation are not abstract ideals but lived, transformative realities.
The pedagogical lesson here, one that Paulo deeply understood, is that fascism begins with hateful words, the demonization of others considered disposable, and moves to an attack on ideas, the burning of books, the disappearance of intellectuals, and the horrors of detention jails and camps. As a form of cultural politics, critical pedagogy as rendered by Freire provides the promise of a protected space within which to think against the grain of received opinion, a space to question and challenge, to imagine the world from different standpoints and perspectives, to reflect upon ourselves in relation to others and, in so doing to understand what it means to “assume a sense of political and social responsibility.” [38]
We live at a time when the language of democracy has been pillaged, stripped of its promises and hopes. For instance, in the age of alleged fake news and post-truth, the degradation of language reinforces Umberto Eco’s remark that education as an organizing feature of fascism, “undermines civic literacy and produces an impoverished vocabulary and elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” [39]
Freire was right in insisting that if right-wing populism and authoritarianism are to be defeated, there is a need to make education an organizing principle of politics and, in part, this can be done with a substantively critical language, critical literacy, and pedagogy that exposes and unravels falsehoods, systems of oppression, and corrupt relations of power while making clear that an alternative future is possible.
Freire has entrusted us with a vision of critical pedagogy that demands educators ensure the future leans toward a more socially just world—a world where critique and possibility intertwine with the values of reason, freedom, and equality to reshape the foundations of how life is lived. His approach empowers students to think and act with creativity and independence while reminding us, as Stanley Aronowitz once argued, that the educator’s role is “to encourage human agency, not mold it in the manner of Pygmalion.”[40]
In a world fractured by rising authoritarianism and the unchecked power of capitalism, Freire’s pedagogy stands as a vital roadmap for reclaiming agency, fostering a politics of resistance, and nurturing anti-capitalist values that confront oppression and envision transformative possibilities. His work speaks not only to the intellect but also to the imagination, offering a song of liberation that calls us to cross borders—not just between nations and cultures but between despair and hope, between subjugation and freedom. It is an enduring testament to the power of education to resist, to reimagine, and to reclaim the promise of a more equitable and humane world.
Notes.
[1] Ginger Gibson, “Trump says immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ Biden campaign likens comments to Hitler,” NBC News (December 17, 2024). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141
[2] See for example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Bloomsbury, 1968); Pedagogy of Hope (London: Bloomsbury, 1996); Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield1998)
[3] Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta, “Universities should not silence Research and Speech on Palestine,” The Conversation(November 27, 2024). Online: https://theconversation.com/universities-should-not-silence-research-and-speech-on-palestine-243880
[4] Henry Giroux, Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2025).
[5] A good starting point to examine post-colonial studies in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2005)
[6] Stanley Aronowitz, “Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy: Not Mainly a teaching method,” in Robert Lake and Tricia Kress, eds. Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis (New York, NY: Continuum, 2012).
[7].An excellent analysis of this problem among Freire’s followers can be found in Gail Stygall, “Teaching Freire in North America” Journal of Teaching Writing (1988), pp. 113-125.
[8]. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York Routledge, 1990), p. 158.
[9].Joan Borsa, “Towards a Politics of Location,” Canadian Women Studies (Spring, 1990), p. 36.
[10].Ernesto Laclau quoted in: Strategies Collective, “Building a New Left: An Interview with Ernesto Laclau, Strategies, N0. 1 (1988), p. 12.
[11] Ibid. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.
[12] Michael Klune, “We Asked for it: The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 18, 2024).
[13] Ibid. Heidi Matthews, Fatima Ahdash, and Priya Gupta.
[14] Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1994), pp. 100-101
[15]. Op. cit., Laclau, p. 27.
[16] Toni Morrison, “How Can Values Be Taught in This University,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Spring 2001),p.278
[17]. My use of the terms exile and “homelessness” have been deeply influenced by the following essays: Carol Becker, “Imaginative Geography,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, unpublished paper, 1991, 12 pp.; Abdul JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of Border Intellectual,” University of California, Berkeley, unpublished paper, 34pp.; Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds., Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990); Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do With It?” In Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring, 1987), pp. 187-198; see also selected essays in Bell Hooks, Talking Back (Boston: South End Press,1989), Yearning (South End Press, 1990).
[18]. JanMohamed, Ibid. p. 27.
[19]. Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” The Oxford Literary Review N0. 9 (1987), p. 28.
[20]. See for example, Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1985); Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1987); Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation(London: Macmillan, 1987); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
[21]. I have taken this term from JanMohamed, “Worldliness-Without World, Homelessness-as-Home,” Ibid.
[22] Paulo Freire quoted in Paulo Freire and Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 13.
[23] Adorno cited in Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990), p. 365.
[24].Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ibid., p. 197.
[25].Carol Becker, “Imaginative Geography,” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, unpublished paper, 1991, p. 1.
[26].JanMohamed, Ibid., p. 10.
[27].Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Ibid., p. 365.
[28].JanMohamed, Ibid., p. 3o [29].Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage Books, 1979).
[30] Cornel West, “Decentring Europe: A memorial Lecture for James Snead,” Critical Inquiry 33:1 (1991), p. 4.
[31].Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990), viii.
[32].For an excellent discussion of these issues as they specifically relate to post-colonial theory, see Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” The Oxford Literary Review Vol. 9 (1987), 27-58; Abdul JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); Gayatri, C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990); Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990).
[33].Gayatri. C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, op. cit., 42.
[34].This position is explored in Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23:1 (1988), 169-181; Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9:1 (1987), 17-34.
[35].Robert Young, White Mythologies, op. cit., 119.
[36].Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire,” in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds. Past the Last Post (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 176.
[37].I explore this issue in Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992).
[38] Jon Nixon, “Hannah Arendt: Thinking Versus Evil,” Times Higher Education, (February 26, 2015). Online at: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/hannah-arendt-thinking-versus-evil/2018664.article?page=0%2C0
[39] Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995). Online:
[40][40]. Stanley Aronowitz, “Introduction,” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), p. 5.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
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