The current global literacy rate in adults is estimated at 85% and higher (UNESCO 2021). Despite that convincing literacy rate, Nation states require citizens to be more than literate (i.e. to be able to read, write and count). Preferably, citizens are educated to participate in and identify with the national project through cultural literacy, built around the narration of the Nation through curricula, canons and valuable knowledge (Hirsch 1988; Bhabha 1990).
This paper situates the cultural literacy project as a Nation-state led shift from literacy education to cultural literacy education of hegemonic citizenship. Motivated to rethink cultural literacy as a forum for radical dialogic education, it translates Freire’s literacy work of liberation, hope and freedom to postcolonial Western-Europe. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s double bind and Antonio Gramsci’s radical education this chapter deploys ‘enabling violation’ as framework to reimagine political liberation in postcolonial Western-Europe. Freire thought of empowering literacy education to simultaneously foster knowledgeability (1), politically engagement (2) and imagination (3). This multifaceted approach will be translated to contemporary cultural literacy projects in the Western-European invested in including/integrating/assimilating the racial other into a culturally literate ally. The critical appropriation of the dominant literacy, as argued by Freire, will be juxtaposed to the critical appropriation of the dominant culture, as argued by Gramsci. On the junction of both pedagogies, cultural literacy becomes a practice of - what Gayatri Spivak denotes as - ‘enabling violation’, and critical appropriation of cultural literacy could enable citizens to not only participate in society but govern and radically transform society.

literature review

Theoretical framework

Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London, UK: Penguin Books. Hirsch, E. D. 1988. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York. Freire, Paulo, and Henry A. Giroux. 1985. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. Translated by Donaldo Macedo. 1st edition. South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2013. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 350. Mayo Peter 1999. Gramsci, Freire and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Palgrave Macmillan Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. Nation & Narration. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203388341. Giroux, Henry A. 2011. On Critical Pedagogy. New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Academic. Anderson, Benedict. 2016. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books.