Literacy Colloquy: Sandro Barros

Finding Freire in Translation: Towards a New Culture of Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Audiences: General Public, College of Education Faculty, Staff, and Students

Since its publication in 1968/1940, Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (POTO) has elicited strong reactions across the field of education. While the Brazilian pedagogue’s seminal work has been a source of inspiration to many educators concerned with the democratization of knowledge in society, criticisms of POTO abound. Some scholars assert, for instance, that Freire’s text is obscure and dogmatic. Others characterize POTO as the product of a white, condescending, elitist and male-centric view of education that romanticizes alterity within Enlightenment’s rationality.

As a Brazilian who reads Freire in Portuguese and Spanish, I find such critiques—coming from members of both the left and right intelligentsia—rather strange and incompatible with my own readings of POTO. To me, Freire’s seminal work is far from vague, pedantic or dogmatically Marxist, although the spirit of Hegel certainly haunts every chapter of POTO. As readers of Freire’s work in both Portuguese and Spanish will be quick to note, the English version differs significantly from the original, both in spirit and in form. Freire’s original text is a protean intellectual project that weaves together discursive genres such as the Latin American cronica, the testimonio, poetry, philosophy, sociolinguistics and literary policy analysis. Many of these discursive features, however, are lost in the English translation.

Thus, this talk asks the following questions: 1) What does it mean to “find Freire in translation?” 2) What reading cultures direct the semiosis of Freire’s text in the linguistic landscape of U.S. academy? Put differently, how does power and its representative discipline and orchestrate the meaning of Freire’s work in translation? To attend these queries, I will begin my presentation by briefly tracing POTO’s genealogy, highlighting some of the inquiry projects that have emerged from the Brazilian pedagogue’s work in American universities. Subsequently, I will analyze two issues that I view as particularly challenging to POTO’s translation to English. The first concerns the work’s anthropophagic aesthetics, which requires that one situate Freirean philosophy within the intellectual tradition of Brazilian modernismo. The second issue corresponds to the specificities and regional markers of Freire’s rhetoric, the ways in which his prose transitions seamlessly between the oral and the written registers, the regional and the crudite forms of linguistic expression, the politically profane and the politically religious, the regional and the translocal. A critical engagement with the sociocultural and linguistic translatability of Freire’s seminal text thus provides us with a unique opportunity to understand POTO outside the conventional Manichean rhetoric that hijacks the text’s meaningfulness and potential to be a transhumanist/anticolonial project for personal and social liberation.

About the presenter: 

Sandro Barro’s research interests focus on broad issues connected with multilingual development, culture and language politics in K-16 curricula. He is interested in how the study of languages other than English (LOTE) shapes the public’s perception of citizenship and belonging within the context of the nation-state. He analyzes the connection between ideologies of language learning and how they support truth regimes that influence multilingual pedagogy discourse. Barros asks: How do intellectuals and policymakers exercise their institutional power to influence public thought in the name of the common good? How do second language pedagogy discourses reinforce monolingual ideologies and how do they assist us in cultivating linguistic diversity?

Sponsors: Department of Teacher Education