Abstract
This paper takes up the theorization of the dialectical relationships between consciousness, praxis, and contradiction by drawing primarily on the work of critical feminist and anti-racist scholars Roxana Ng and Paula Allman. Beginning with the important Marxist theorizations of the lives of immigrant women, the state, and community services made by Roxana Ng, we move forward with asserting that Roxana’s commitment to making social relations of power and exploitation ‘knowable’ and ‘transformable’ is based on a complex and revolutionary articulation of the relationship between thinking and being. This dialectical conceptualization of praxis is necessary for any potentially coherent revolutionary feminist anti-racist project. The challenge posed by Roxana is two-fold: not only how best to ‘know’ the world, but how to teach this analysis and generate revolutionary practice.
Highlights
Roxana Ng was our friend, colleague, and teacher
In reading The German Ideology, for example, we examined the dialectics of productive and reproductive labour as class relations historically constituted through race and gender relations
We marked the end of the book with a new beginning by raising the question: How to formulate a theoretical framework, drawing on anti-racism, postcolonial studies, feminism, and dialectical historical materialism, through which we could better understand the particular historical moment in which we live? From this standpoint, how do we make invisible social relations visible? how do we teach this? Acknowledging the simple but not simplistic nature of these questions, we ended by stating: CARPENTER, RITCHIE AND MOJAB: The Dialectics of Praxis
Summary
We would like to take this opportunity and put forward some ideas in order to open up the possibilities for a renewed debate on the dialectics of experience, learning, consciousness and practice in relation to the problematic of revolutionary feminism. While the source of its growth, generation, change, and application are much debated, we have observed a fundamental problem in how the two parts of this relation (theory and practice) are theorized in relation to each other This struggle is in part due to deficits within critical pedagogical theory that do not devote adequate attention to the foundational texts of the Marxist tradition of educational philosophy (Carpenter & Mojab, 2013). Roxana’s work expresses consistently that experiential reality is the starting point for any feminist or anti-racist inquiry and theorization into the constitution of social relations and everyday life This commitment to ‘standpoint’ and the everyday as problematic was driven by her profound understanding of the complexity of experiential reality as a multiplicity of moments. If the sensuous practice of daily life is social, it is this practice, in both its individual and social expressions, that is the subject and object of the formation of critical or revolutionary consciousness, a consciousness that seeks a dialectical understanding of contradictions (Allman, 2001; Au 2007; Tse-Tung 2007)
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