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Hannah Arendt articulates natality as the very "essence of education." Natality expresses the unique capacity of each person to bring about something new in relation to an inherited world. Education's difficult work, in Arendt's view, is not only to introduce students to the truths of the world as it is, but also to nurture the capacity to make this world become something new. But what are the psychic difficulties inherent in allowing subjects to become new people in the aftermath of social traumas such as gender, class and racial inequality? Arguing against educational approaches that universalize identity, I suggest that an ethos of forgiveness supports a cosmopolitan educational project, which articulates the necessity of responsibility across social difference and beyond inherited notions of group belonging. Forgiveness does not replace the demand for justice, a concern that worries many critical educators, but opens us to the interpretive work of forgings new meaning, and new forms of ethical sociality, from the site of difficulty. Forgiveness's work in education is not to dictate a particular sanctioned position, but to generate the conditions for subjects-both perpetrators and victims of social injustices-to continue reconstituting themselves as individuals in the process of becoming. Taking up Clement Virgo's feature film Poor Boy's Game (2007), which explores the aftermath of a devastating racist incident, I suggest that cultural production, which gives narrative voice to the difficult affects of social trauma, offers a curricular model for engaging with the, at times unthinkable, possibility that life can continue after horror. A DIFFICULT COSMOPOLITANISMIn his 2007 feature film Poor Boy's Game, black-Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo takes his audience into the aporetic space of forgiveness. As the film begins, white, working-class boxer Donny Rose has just been released from a juvenile prison for participating in a brutal, racist assault on Charlie Carvery, one of Donny's black competitors on the boxing circuit. The devastating attack has left Charlie permanently brain damaged, and under the lifelong care of his parents. Upon his return to the community, Donny is challenged to a very public revenge match against a local black champion

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Todd, S. (2009). Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism. Boulder & London: Paradigm.