Knowledge and Education: From Assimilation to Liberation

We are pleased to invite you to the panel discussion „Knowledge and Education: From Assimilation to Liberation“, as part of the project „Paradoxes of Emancipation“. In this first event of the project, Iracema Dulley (ICI Berlin) and Isadora Mota (Princeton) will address the different functions that knowledge can assume in the lives of populations subjected to colonial rule. In her coming book Freedom’s Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Princeton University Press), Isadora Mota argues that abolitionism was also a grassroots movement anchored in the social and conceptual lives of slaves, recaptives, freedpeoples, and quilombolas, therefore positing Brazil as an important force in the Age of Emancipation. Accordingly, her presentation will focus on the association between self-education processes and slave protests. Iracema Dulley is the author of On the Emic Gesture – Difference and Ethnography in Roy Wagner (Routledge, 2019), and is working on a new book on processes of subject constitution in colonial and post-colonial Angola. Her presentation will address how the promise of assimilation via education announced by the indigenato regime in colonial Angola (1926-1961) constituted a political environment and symbolic structure that endured after Angola’s independence in 1975.