Critique of the white reason. Antonia Darder: the fearless roaring of a sublime freirean-neogramscian voice

Abstract

This article exfoliates Antonia Darder’s critical excavations on cultural democracy and schooling. The article unfolds her arguments in the context of our contemporary epoch, an epoch paced by an absurd. In doing so, the paper scrutinizes eugenics and the curriculum epistemicide as the real colors of such absurdity in our field. The paper situates such absurdity within the matrix of Modern Western Eurocentric reason – a Prosperous reason – and examinates its non-derivative abyssal nature. The article also unpacks Darder’s call to challenge such eugenic reason, through a commitment to decolonize our cultural forms, the very praxis of democracy as well as our educational institutions, educational policy, curriculum, and teacher preparation programs. The article flags categories such as race and language as quite dear to a Freirean scholar with a strong Neogramscian footprint such as Antonia Darder. The article ends by examining not only, how the notion of cultural democracy in schooling and pedagogies speaks volumes to what I have called itinerant educational and curriculum theories, but also how the piece is a clear call to some of the challenges we face within the critical and post critical territories.