Ethnic-racial relations and education: between the politics of fulfilment and the transfiguration policy

Abstract

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/198271991219

The change in the legal framework brought by the alterations in Law n. 9394/1996, the  National Education Bases and Guidelines Law, as a result of Law n. 10.639 / 2003 and its practical deployment, present in the Curriculum Guidelines for the Education of Race Relations and the Teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian History and Culture, may compose the contemporary collection of multiple, diverse, creative and necessary propositions to re-situate Africa and the African Diaspora in world history. The consequence is the deconstruction of the Hegelian and Enlightenment version produced on the continent that formed the basis for the European imperialist enterprise of global dominance that now has been, at least, challenged in terms of its basics. The so-called guidelines for the "education of the race relations", as they have symptomatically been referred to by the activists of the black movement and scholars, position the need to teach History and Afro-Brazilian and African culture beyond the racial issue. My goal, in this text, is to declare that the emphasis on the "education of the race relations" restricts the scope of the guidelines, as it limits their horizon to the politics of fulfilment that, according to Gilroy (1993), has been practiced by the slave descendants, requiring the bourgeois civil society to fulfill the promises of their own rhetoric. In other words, it creates the means to establish demands for goals such as a non-racialized justice and the organization of production processes. Its maximum expression is the intersection between the recognition policy and the redistributive policy. In contrast, with the politics of fulfilment, Gilroy proposes the transfiguration policy that evokes utopian references, which, in Brazil, are associated with the possibilities opened by the teaching of African history and Afro-Brazilian history, re-situating Africa and the African Diaspora in world history, beyond the widespread racialized reading in Western education. An important tool of the deconstruction is to know the questioning and interventions that black intellectuals (African and Diaspora’s) addressed to the main axes of the global intellectual history that excluded both Africa and themselves.

Key words: Race relations, Recognition, Diaspora, Education.