Toward a Cosmopolitan Curriculum of Forgiveness

Abstract

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

The living archive of war in Rabih Mroué's Make Me Stop Smoking

“…His rant, although an apology, is not exactly seeking forgiveness, unless forgiveness is defined, as R.M. Kennedy (2011) does, citing Hannah Arendt, 'as one of the faculties that enable us both to account for our own fallibility and allow others, including injurious others, to continue to become new people after wrongdoing' (p. 378). If forgiveness allows you to imagine new responses to conflict and social breakdown, as Kennedy suggests, and keeps you from the repetitions that melancholically reproduce rather than renew the past, then Mroué's inventory of apologies can be read as creating two possibilities in a single move: one, that Mroué 'forgive' himself for his 'crimes', and, two, that he forgive those who have committed crimes against him and others.…”

The emotional regimes of reconciliation in history textbook revision: reflections on the politics of resentment and the politics of empathy in post-conflict societies

“…also, it is interesting to examine how other students who may not be directly involved in a conflict (e.g., immigrants) are drawn into the politics of resentment by this separation option (see Zembylas, Charalambous, and Charalambous, 2016). Furthermore, the meaning and significance of practices such as 'forgiveness' might be complicated in cosmopolitan contexts (Kennedy 2011) and especially in contexts in which the boundaries of victims and perpetrators are blurred Zembylas and Michaelidou 2013); an ethos of forgiveness would throw into question several tenets of the separation option, for example. RM Kennedy's (2011) work on forgiveness, in particular, allows for a much more complex vocabulary regarding what it means to work through historical trauma.…”

Estudos curriculares: desafios teóricos e metodológicos

“…A mundialidade de um currículo cosmopolita, para William Pinar (2009, p. 8), implica reconhecer, em primeiro lugar, "a educação geral como algo mais do que a introdução às grandes obras e a memorização do conhecimento essencial e, em segundo, a personificação do individual". Significa, ainda, a valorização do "self" e do "sujeito" em diálogo com os "outros", bem como a sua criatividade, a rejeição de abordagens que universalizam a identidade, a diferença e a diversidade, (KENNEDY, 2011;GAZTAMBID-FERNANDEZ, THIESSEN, 2009;BAKER, 2010;CARLSON, 2009;TODD, 2009;HANSEN, BURDICK-SHEPHERD, CAMMARANO, OBELLEIRO, 2009, HANSEN, 2008, para além da exploração dos "receios, expetativas e esperanças" dos sujeitos intervenientes no currículo (GOUGH, 2010, p. 31).…”