This volume offers a deep interpretation of Edward Said’s literary thought towards the development of educational criticism. Insofar as Said’s academic career was built around the contours of literary analysis, Leonardo demonstrates how Said’s work propels scholarship on schooling in ways that enrich our ability to generate insights about the educational enterprise.
The book draws from four main themes of Said’s work – knowledge construction as part of empire, representations and reconstruction of the intellectual, the exile condition, and contrapuntal analysis. These themes cohere in providing the elements of educational criticism and placing them in the wider context of a rapidly changing sociality and educational system. The author reviews key arguments in the field whilst contributing new analyses designed to elicit wide-ranging discussions. Edward Said and Education is a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of education studies, postcolonial studies, and ethnic studies.
1 Dis-orienting Western Knowledge: Coloniality, Curriculum and Crisis; 2 Teachers as Anti-intellectuals: Toward the Reconstruction of Expert(ise); 3 Pedagogies of Exile: Learning in and out of Place; 4 Educational Criticism and Contrapuntal Analysis
Biography
Zeus Leonardo is Professor and Associate Dean of Education and Faculty of the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis at the University of California, Berkeley.
In these powerful pages, Zeus Leonardo reminds us why he is one of the leading critical theorists of education of our time. He lucidly grapples with and articulates Edward Said’s field defining post-colonial project for education broadly and curriculum studies specifically. He also develops his articulation toward an educational criticism, one that asserts "our human powers with the ultimate goal of humanization." We would be wise to follow Zeus Leonardo’s contrapuntal lead.
Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
On a journey with Edward Said, Leonardo reinvigorates the field of education with the urgency of anti-coloniality and anti-imperialism, and with the hope of freedom-seeking study and praxis. This book brings Said in conversation with de/postcolonial, critical race, feminist and educational theorists to engage questions of curriculum and the canon, the intellectual and the educator/expert, and co-existence in difference. Reading Leonardo with educational anthropology and Latina/x Studies, I am inspired by his call for an educational criticism that emerges from the optics of the marginalized – a reading that does not take anything for granted yet fosters a reading of the complimentary in our diverse forms of experience and resistance.
Sofia A. Villenas, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology at Cornell University
Edward Said and Education is a brilliant addition to our understanding of how to engage critically the field of education by drawing upon the work of Edward Said. Not only does Leonardo rethink the work of Said in relation to other theorists, and how his work contributes to advancing the field of educational criticism, it also rewrites how a critical understanding and engagement with knowledge, the role of the intellectual, and the politics of exile can help us understand both the crisis of education and its articulation within the larger crisis of a democratic ideal forged under the sign of colonization. This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in education, the work of Edward Said, and the place of theory in rethinking what might be called the politics of education.
Henry Giroux holds the Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest at McMaster University, Canada
