LAST POST Goodbye Tarragona… or better saying: Adéu Tarragona

Friday was my last day in Tarragona before starting my long trip back to Brazil. I spent a little bit more than 2 weeks talking about Decolonial Knowledge. The name is impressive, but it can be summarized to an attempt to change our parameters of what is fair, honest and wise to think and do. This think and do is not only, but also related to what and how we teach in the classroom. For me, this was one of the most important aspects learned/shared here. But there are more.

I was lucky for being placed in an apartment with extraordinary people. All my roommates (Mark, Robert, Pablo, Juan Jose, Atman, Francisco and Adrian) helped me in a way or another. They have wonderful stories and great intelligence, which they’ve shared without asking anything in exchange.

Adding to them, I must confess that the women present in this summer school were amazing. I’m not referring to their beauty, but to their character, their ability to learn through moments of pain and anger and transform it into something beautiful, something inspiring to us, men, that eager to have women by our side, not behind us. Thank you Rosalee, Citlali, Sandrine, Cynthia, Ana Lúcia, Allison, Francesca, Marlou, … They were so many (from the 50 participants, I think 40 were women). I’d have to name them all to be fair with all of them, but I lack time (flight is about to depart). But I cannot forget to mention that, yes, they were also very good-looking, which made the discussions pleasant to the mind and to the eye.

Also I can’t forget the excellent lectures we had, that in a way or another made me think more about the world we live in: Prof. Grosfoguel, Prof. Patterson, Prof. Sandoval, Prof. Sayyid and Prof. Nimako. To all of you, to the extra lecturers and to Roberto (who worked so much to make it all as smooth as possible), thank you!

I have to thank my school, for funding me too, right? But I must say that the most important people I should thank are my students. It was because of them that I decided to come, it is because of them that I sacrifice myself sometimes, it is because of them that I don’t give up from the struggle.

(…)

On Friday night, the two last men standing in the fort, Adrian and me were invited to a small get-together at the next-door undergrats apartment. Two girls invited us to go. And suddenly, all the discussions, all the ideas, all the disturbance caused during this course came out in our minds. As we used to do every afternoon in the 5B, we sat and discussed about what we had experienced.

Funny… now I remember what we just did. We were witnessing to each other how the brown folks were trying to fit in with the white folks in that get-together.

And we witnessed for 2 hours.

And we cried.

There is a lot of work to do. And I won’t give up. I won’t be left behind. I won’t be another corpse left in the battlefield. I decided to fight. I decided to look up high in the sky, to be proud, to feel the pain and anger of my comadres and compadres, hermanos in color and history. I decided to be beside the strongest women and the ones that feel weakened. To the other forms of sexuality. To the other forms of oppression. Side to side of the racial struggle. Incorporate myself in the others, the otherness.

I am the other in me.

And I need to decolonize the time and the space too. Thinking beyond the borders of clock-controlled time and meter-measured space. Rethink the sciences, the methodology of education. Rethink goals and objectives. Rethink evaluation processes, grades, and standards. Rethink everything.

And if one, just one of my students learns that… I’ll be realized as an educator.

Now I go back to my world. I won’t have this wonderful people everyday to help me to think what is going on. I’ll have to do it by myself. But I’m a grown up – I guess I can do that. It’s my battle against me and the ones I need to make see. I can do it.

And then my Tarragona buddies come back again to see me, in my mind… to help me to stay decolonized and to decolonize another person. You all come here anytime I need you.

Thank you for coming back.

SAYYID – Lecture 2 – From Kemalism to the Islamic States

The break of Westernized/Westphalian state in the Muslim World started with the creation of Pakistan. It hosted 33% of the Muslim population in the world until 1971. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution added more elements into the Muslim State configuration. The Iranian Revolution happened in a place which was mostly urban, living in the profits of oil exploration, which made it almost impossible to predict (and then, allowing the Western World to stop it).

The White Revolution (1963-73) was a reaction to the rise of the Muslim States. For them, there was a dichotomy:

“True Islam” = Shadow of God = “Social Justice” = WHITE REVOLUTION

Opposite of

“Black Reaction”= Backward Iran = “Red Destruction”

A more complete relationship is:

Pre-Islamic Aryan Persia = Shah/”Spiritual Leader” = Great Civilization = White Revolution = USA / Free World = Resurgency Party = SAVAK

Opposite of

Arabic occupied Semitic Persia = Black Reaction = Backward Iran = Red Destruction = TRAITORS

The expanding logic of Great Civilization can be defined by the quote of General Iberico Saint Jean

“First we must kill the subversives, then their sympathizers, then the indifferent and finally the timid.”

But how to destroy a determination built so strong in our minds? Freud can give some answers. It is called OverDetermination: if you dream about a person it does not follow that you are dreaming about that specific person. It can be interpret as anything, which is not exactly what it looks in a first moment, because actions and actors carry meanings. “The meaning of signifier cannot be read back to its signifier”.

Another way is to use Intertextuality, which says that:

One is never in one discourse;

The impossibility of denotation means the social is always a connotative field;

Denotation is the last connotation.

And to think:

“Mohammed of Arabia ascended to the highest heaven and returned, by God. If I had reached that point I should not have returned.” Abdul Quddus of Gangoh in Mohhamed Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought.

Lecture of DAPHNE TAYLOR-GARCIA: “Newly Discovered Countries”: Sexuality, Print Culture and Colonialism

Prof. DAPHNE V. TAYLOR-GARCÍA is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her article (“The Discursive Construction of "Women" in the Americas: An Analysis of 16th Century Print Culture” ) is available here.

“Pedro Alvares Cabral is also from a wealthy family. He was chosen by the Royal Family to continue Vasco da Gama’s work. […] The description of people in Brazil […] is like arabs, by their color […] they were very sexualized […] girls by the age of 8 would be looking for partners, because they knew they wouldn’t be able to hold a husband without their virginity. […] All descriptions are very sexualized.”

SAYYID – Lecture 1 – Introduction of Decolonial and Postcolonial Muslim Studies

Prof. SALMAN SAYYID is a Reader in Postcolonialism and Racism Studies and Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK (click here to visit the page). Here, a Amazon search of his publications. Here, Prof. Sayyid in the Lecture List (“Mirror, Mirror: Western democrats, oriental despots?”). Sayyid and Barnor Heese’s article “A war against politics?”, published at OpenDemocracy.net in 2001 here.

Sayyid started remembering us of the X-Files Affirmation:  “The truth is out there”. As it may sound funny, he calls our attention to the truth that is supposed not to be based in our common sense of what is the Orient, the Islam, the Other. Below, some of his slides.

“The Scandal of Islam

How can we explain the appearance in the Modern World of something which is pre-Modern?

The disclosure of ‘Islam’ is experienced politically, since the political is sign of disruption of what is considered to be natural or conventional.”

The development of the world is just one: the Western model.

The enemy is the one that prevents you from being yourself.”

“Politics

A politics without difference is not possible, but differences are not permanent.

A politics without decisions are not possible, but all decisions are provisional.

Politics is about formation of identities

All identities are about exclusion and inclusion”

“Geopolitical Challenge

‘War Against Terror’ as grammar of international relations

Internal Security and Surveillance of ethnically marked”

Audio removal

To the readers,

As asked by the lecturers, I took off the audio from the posts. The links will be there, but they will take you nowhere. I cannot publish them, nor share them. I'm sorry, but to know what happened here word by word, you should have spent some time with us, here.