In the context of the increasingly transnational organization of society, culture, and communication, this article develops a conceptualization of the global common as a basic condition of interrelation and shared experience, and describes contemporary political efforts to fully democratize this condition. The article demonstrates the implications for curriculum and teaching of this project, describing in particular the importance of fundamentally challenging the interpellation of students as subjects of the nation, and the necessity for new and radically collaborative forms of political (...) and pedagogical authority that can more powerfully realize the imaginative potential of educators and students alike as global democratic actors. In this effort, familiar progressive educational ideas (e.g. the importance of the continuity of the curriculum, and the meaning and purpose of experimentalism) are interrogated and rearticulated. The article concludes with a discussion of the unique ways in which education can contribute to constructing a democratic society in the global era, and how the central aspects of such a pedagogy in common can also suggest essential principles for the organization of social movements in this context. (shrink)

The work of Hardt and Negri offers the field of education important theoretical resources for reconceptualizing subjectivity as a site of politics. Yet recent shifts on the Left toward more articulated mobilizations, along with the emergence of new decolonizing movements that interrogate the undifferentiated character of the common, partly affirm long-standing critiques of Hardt and Negri’s theses. Rather than rejecting their arguments, we should rethink their central assertions—from the starting point of decolonial theory—in a way that responds to these concerns. (...) We argue that the notion of constituent power grounding their theorization of politics be rethought in dialogue with the ethico-political concept of obediential power ; that the “monstrous” subjectivity they propose as the mode of exodus from given forms of biopolitical production take direction from Wynter’s new Human Project; and that the insurrectionary figure of the multitude be reconsidered alongside the variegated figure of insurgent cosmopolitanism. This rethinking restores to Hardt and Negri’s project a more contextualized and less universalistic theory of politics, and establishes a foundation for a critical pedagogy that, beginning from an accountability to student agency, engages a form of insurgent leadership that responds to the centrality in capitalist education of the historical processes of colonial partition. (shrink)

While the decolonial turn calls into question the broad structure of Western knowledge projects, it also suggests an investigation of the central objects and categories of these projects. This study undertakes this latter investigation in relation to Marxist theory. Starting from the work of Frantz Fanon and contemporary theorists of coloniality, I consider three central figures in the Marxian critique of capital: enclosure, valorization, and real subsumption. Interrogating familiar and heterodox accounts of these figures, my analysis exposes an architecture of (...) injury that comprehends the structure of value and that articulates a process of extended violation working beyond the dialectic. (shrink)

While the decolonial turn calls into question the broad structure of Western knowledge projects, it also suggests an investigation of the central objects and categories of these projects. This study undertakes this latter investigation in relation to Marxist theory. Starting from the work of Frantz Fanon and contemporary theorists of coloniality, I consider three central figures in the Marxian critique of capital: enclosure, valorization, and real subsumption. Interrogating familiar and heterodox accounts of these figures, my analysis exposes an architecture of (...) injury that comprehends the structure of value and that articulates a process of extended violation working beyond the dialectic. (shrink)