Recontextualising race, politics and inequality in transnational knowledge circulation: Biographical resignifications

Abstract

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the resignification of globally circulating texts in terms of their entextualisation and reflect on my own role in this process through an auto-ethnographic narrative. I focus on two widely circulating texts that explicitly deal with questions of social power and globalisation: ‘On the cunning of imperialist reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) and ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies’ (The New London Group, 1996). Examination of their re-entextualisation in Brazil points to the need to bring to bear additional epistemological resources attuned to social and political struggles in order to address the racial inequalities that have come to be at the forefront of my own scholarly concerns. The article concludes by suggesting ways of engaging with globally circulating knowledge through the incorporation of knowledge produced by local struggles and emerging from everyday categories, giving the example of possible uses of the Brazilian concept of gambiarra.