When difference comes with school: In these antibrown times

Abstract

From the vantage point of Ta Moko, this paper reads educational practices as ancestral rituals engendering antibrownness. Antibrownness is the social and analytical routine that this paper attempts to unsettle by examining the curricular practices of difference making in literacy in primary education in the US as the locus of colonial interrogation. The paper unpacks how young people reckon with difference in schools through the popular culture lens they bring with them to the classrooms. One of the curiosities driving this inquiry is the potential the visual cultures young people participate in hold to trans-form school curricula from a perspective of First Peoples and related entities. In the first section, Moko as a factual and fictive narrative situates the inquiry. Section two spells out the specifics of the location and position on this project and paper. Section three engages with antibrownness while section four zooms into Disney as a popular culture lens producing frames of mind and performances of antibrownness. Section five delves into three classroom events of difference making in literacy curriculum. The concluding section points to the youth’s interruptions and gestures towards the potential of popular moving images for unsettling antibrownness.

Keywords:

• Curriculum
• Indigenous
• school
• diversity
• Native American
• youth

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Georgina Stewart and Dr Jeanine Leane for their thoughtful comments on the Moko piece. Special thanks to Dr Muna Saleh and Dr Fikile Nxumalo for their feedback on the entire piece, the anonymous reviewers and their meticulous reading, and to the brilliant editorial team at CI.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Melbourne [McKenzie Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Ligia (Licho) López López

Ligia (Licho) López López is a Queer Caribbean academic residing and learning as an uninvited guest in Narrm (Melbourne, Australia). She is an assistant professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research, drawing from the histories of dispossession and Black and Brown rising, interrogates what the notion of diversity does in the social world (diverse from what?). Licho is the author of The Making of Indigeneity, Curriculum History and the Limits of Diversity (Routledge, 2018). Her work has appeared in Race Ethnicity and Education, The British Journal of Sociology of Education, and Discourse. She is currently working on two books under contract with Routledge entitled Taking place: Indigenous perspectives on future(s) and learning(s) (with Gioconda Coello) and Migrating Americas: Interrogating the relations between migration and education in the South (with Ivón Cepeda and María Emilia Tijoux). Licho's work strives to challenge the colonial frontiers of exploration in order to create educational futures that grow antibrown and antiblack racism free social worlds.