Intercultural Conversational Methodology: Teaching Gendered Racisms from Colonialism to Globalization

The papers collected in Interculturality and Gender present the results of five years of transdisciplinary work practiced by ReSisters, one of the sub-groups within Travelling Concepts in the European thematic research network Athena. Devoted to experimenting with collaborative teaching practices that aim to enhance intercultural dialogue in a gendered perspective, to foster co-operation among European scholars, and to nourish exchanges between academics and civil society, the network was the recipient of the EU prize in 2010. Interculturality and Gender argues that teaching across disciplines and languages means teaching across histories and cultures in order to articulate and even invent a ground of shared knowledges. Doing or making interculturality cannot be the task of a pedagogical praxis restricted within the walls of the classroom or within the boundaries of discourses. It should be instead an always already political act that, in recognizing theory as praxis, always operates in the site of politics where social, historical and civic conflicts and oppositions are at stake, as it is the site not only of those who are recognized by law but also the site of those constituencies who are still unconstituted. Giovanna Covi’s essay “Intercultural Conversational Methodology: Teaching Gendered Racisms from Colonialism to Globalization” argues that engaging interculturality and gender is based on the assumption that change can effectively occur only when the conditions of possibility and necessity are joined together. It advocates critical identity politics and radical democracy so that social transformation is possible not only through mass revolutions but also through the re-articulations of daily social relations. Relying on Judith Butler’s definition of a universality that is anchored on a specific cultural language, and therefore on the vulnerability of discourse, it privileges translation as praxis. This offers the possibility, although not the necessity, of liberating the past from the control of the parameters by which the universal is defined within politics, since “without translation, the only way the assertion of universality can cross a border is through a colonial and expansionist logic” (Butler). The essay further argues that feminist pedagogy needs a method that must be contingent and plural—that is, intercultural—to propose a conversational methodology. It considers Rossana Rossanda’s La perdita as an apt model of learning to learn that invites us to participate in the endless effort to express our diversely lived lives, and to name the hopes of what is yet to come, in that endless future that, if envisioned, may bring the necessary change to our present. In pursuing the acceptance of translation’s partial impossibility—its being never quite accomplished, always provisional—and the awareness of translation’s absolute necessity—its being always a final choice, incapable of showing what hides behind the mask, and thus potentially assimilationist—the essay relies on Adrienne Rich’s idea of the never found land to create a counterhegemonic pedagogy. It analyses racial critical discourse both in English and Italian and offers a teaching unit on Rosa Parks. Based on the thinking of Leela Gandhi, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Joan Scott, it argues that conversational methodology must join interdisciplinarity, collaborative learning practice and must be declined as creolization (Glissant) in order to articulate the social in ways that reach the imagination of our communities,relinquish the material density of poetry and literature, restore language and nourish listening. R: Wiegman, C. Mohanty, B. Martina, and M. Nussbaum are also brought into the argument for bringing thinking on the edge, where the risk of precariousness is always present but also where the possibility of discovering new possibility is concrete. The illustration of the Teaching Unit on the US Civil Rights Movement hinges on the deconstructin of race as a fixed category. The conlusion, via Donna Haraway and Leela Gandhi, asserts that in spite of the times, the time has come to bring feminist methodology into the making of culture and society and to take responsibility for a more just management of our transnational interconnected, affective communities.