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.

Note

Notes

1 The first known reference to the term cosmopolitan is attributed to Cynic philosopher Diogenes in the 4th century bce, who famously declared when asked where he came from that “I am a kosmopolitês” or literally, a “citizen of the world.” For the Stoic and Cynic philosophers, cosmopolitanism signaled a challenge to the idea that our political responsibilities should be defined exclusively in relation to the polis or city-state. However, despite the term’s Greco-Roman genealogy, the notion that difference must be peacefully accommodated is anything but a Western concept. For example, the Great Law of Peace, the constitutional document of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy) specifically spelled out the terms under which strangers should be extended hospitality and welcomed into the community—an idea articulated hundreds of years before Kant’s law of cosmopolitan right (see Bedford and Workman, 2002). In this sense, it is perhaps best to think of cosmopolitanism as Western thought’s contradictory attempt to critically work through the significance of its own difficulties with otherness.