Political Grace and Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

Antonia Darder

Political grace insists on an ethic of radical risk because the times require it, because the divine plane of creation that offers life is at risk itself from the holocaust of global plunder. Wes Rehberg (2012) The risk of global plunder is evident around the globe, as corporations exert their rule over the material world, poverty intensiNies, and complicit governments justify the denial of social welfare to oppressed populations. We live in an era where neoliberalism has made kowtowing to the interests of the wealthy and powerful above reproach and few courageous oppositional forces have garnered the means or public will to persist in campaigns of public protest. In many instances, the lethal combination of oppressive neoliberal policies and the veneration of technology have effectively ushered in the disposability of a lion share of the working class. No longer are the liberating promises of the enlightenment project, which sought to overcome the tyrannies of autocratic rule and incontrovertible abuses of professed Divine authority able to interrupt the ravages of capitalism at any level. Ecologically, the planet is suffering from what may well be irreparable colonization of the life's sphere, with its unmerciful and heedless destruction of forests, wildlife, soil potency, and water supplies. This ravaging of the earth, indeed, only echoes the violent estrangement and domestication of our own colonization, as the cultures and languages of subaltern populations are rapidly disappearing. It is in the midst of grave economic exploitation and rampant disregard for the lives of the many that Freirian educators, scholars, and activists are called to risk a liberating praxis that embodies a new sense of revolutionary subjecthood and challenges our domesticated tolerances for societal injustice and human oppression. Simultaneously, emancipatory objectives of our pedagogical labor call for building a political solidarity that acknowledges the spiritual oneness of our humanity, while embracing the cultural differences in our expressions, as necessary biodiversity for our human survival and evolution. This entails that, rather than falling into us/them binaries that demonize and segment, we seek to retain the dialectical tensions that forever persist between the universalism of our humanity and the particularisms born from the survival of distinct Political Grace and Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy