Alfabetizzazione interculturale e decolonizzazione della “democrazia inclusiva”


Abstract


Literacy has been, and still is, a very relevant political tool in the process of nation-building, as well as for the education of the “democratic citizen”. However, since the 1980s it has been complexified by considering the role that not only (verbal) language, but the whole of “culture” plays for its achievement. In time, a number of more specific notions such as “cultural literacy”, “critical literacy”, and so on, have been developed with the aim of  making “literacy” a viable tool to allow for more and further “inclusion”, by means of “eradicating illiteracy” all over the world. In this context, I try to show that in order to reach that goal, very improbable if not impossible to achieve, it would be worthwhile taking into  proper account the multicultural composition of contemporary complex societies. Therefore, I firstly give a brief overview of literacy’s development, and secondly, I discuss the notions of multicultural and intercultural literacy. My overall aim, however, is to show that the discourse linking the idea of a more and more inclusive democracy to the notion(s) of literacy has not yet focused on its own culturally biased origins. To argue this point, I briefly refer to decolonial thinking, understood as a theoretical approach that implies the need, and indeed the urgency, to renegotiate also the speaking, the writing and the teaching practices and theories, still modeled according to the culturally biased presuppositions originated from the so-called “western modernity” and particularly from its way of thinking and shaping “knowledge” – that is to say “modern science”. My conclusion is that the absence of such a decolonizing renegotiation implies an inability to come to terms with the limits and exclusions that western-style democracy opposes to the very possibility of building truly interculturally shaped political communities.

DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v41p67

Keywords: literacy; inclusive democracy; critical literacy; cultural, multicultural and intercultural literacy; decolonial thinking

References


Chua A. 2004, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Anchor Books, New York.

Dahlberg L. and Siapera E. (eds.) 2007, Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating Theory and Practice, Palgrave, Houndmills, Basingstoke.

Freire P. and Macedo D. 2005, Literacy: Reading the Word & the World, Routledge, London.

Herman B. 2007, Moral Literacy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Hernandez-Zamora G. 2010, Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism, Multilingual Matters, Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto.

Hirsch E.D. Jr. 1983, Cultural Literacy, in “The American Scholar”, 52 [2], pp. 159-169.

Hobbs R. 2017, Create to Learn: Introduction to Digital Literacy, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ.

Honna N. 2005, English as a Multicultural Language in Asia and Intercultural Literacy, in “Intercultural Communication Studies”, 14 [2], pp. 73-89.

Hsieh B.H.-L. and Hsieh C.-J. 2015, Integrating Multicultural Literacy into Curriculum of Tourism Industry, in “Journal of Tourism and Hospitality Management”, 3 [2], pp. 77-87.

Ikenberry G.J. 1999, Why Export Democracy?, in “The Wilson Quarterly (1976-)”, 23 [2], pp. 56-65.

Jackson J. (ed.) 2012, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication, Routledge, London and New York.

Janks H. 2010, Literacy and Power, Routledge, New York and London.

Kellner P. and Share J. 2007, Critical Media Literacy: crucial policy choices for a twenty-first-century democracy, in “Policy Futures in Education”, 5 [1], pp. 59-69.

Kluckhohn C. e Kroeber A.L. 1952/1982, Il concetto di cultura, trad. it. di E. Calzavara, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Kymlicka W. 1999, La cittadinanza multiculturale, trad. it. di G. Gasperoni, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Kymlicka W. 2001, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.

Maldonado-Torres N. 2011, Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique – An Introduction, in “Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World”, 1 [2], pp. 1-15.

Maldonado-Torres N. 2012, Decoloniality at Large: Towards a Trans-Americas and Global Transmodern Paradigm (Introduction to Second Special Issue of “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn”), in “Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World”, 1 [3], pp. 1-10.

McGinn C. 1992, Moral Literacy, Or How to Do the Right Thing, Gerald Duckworth & Co., London.

Mignolo W.D. 1995, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

Mihailidis P. and Thevenin B. 2013, Media Literacy as a Core Competency for Engaged Citizenship in Participatory Democracy, in “American Behavioral Scientist”, 57 [11], pp. 1611-1622.

Mills C.W. 2015, Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy, in “New Political Science”, 37 [1], pp.1-24.

Monceri F. 2006, Interculturalità e comunicazione. Una prospettiva filosofica, Edizioni Lavoro, Roma.

Monceri F. 2019, Beyond universality: rethinking transculturality and the transcultural self, in “Journal of Multicultural Discourses”, 14 [1], pp. 78-91.

Morais J. 2018, Literacy and democracy, in “Language, Cognition and Neuroscience”, 33 [3], pp. 351-372.

Nakayama T.K. and Halualani R.T. (eds.) 2013, The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester.

Papacharissi Z.A. 2010, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age, Polity, Cambridge-Malden, MA.

Potter W.J. 2015, Introduction to Media Literacy, Sage, Los Angeles et al.

Quijano A. 2000, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America, in “Nepantla: Views from the South”, 1 [3], pp. 533-580.

Quijano A. 2014, Colonialità del potere ed eurocentrismo in America latina, trad. it. di C. Ciccioni, in G. Ascione (a cura di), America latina e modernità. L’opzione decoloniale: saggi scelti, Arcoiris, Salerno, pp. 73-96.

Schraeder P.J. (ed.) 2002, Exporting Democracy: Rethoric Vs. Reality, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, and London.

Silverblatt A. 2014, Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media Messages, Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA et al.

Smith T.G. 2017, Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, The Internet, and Renewing Democracy, University of Westminster Press, London.

Steiner C. (with P. Perry) 1997, Achieving Emotional Literacy: A Personal Program to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence, William Morrow, New York.

Weil D. 1993, Towards a Critical Multicultural Literacy: Advancing and Education for Liberation, in “Roeper Review”, 15 [4], pp. 211-217.

White R.E. and Cooper, K. 2015, Democracy and Its Discontents: Critical Literacy across Global Contexts, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam/Boston/Taipei.

Yoon B. 2016, Critical Literacies: Global and Multicultural Perspectives, Springer, Singapore et al.

Riferimenti sitografici

JUST ACTIONS, Eradicate Illiteracy. http://justactions.org/just-action/eradicate-illiteracy/ (15/10/2020).

UNESCO, Literacy. https://en.unesco.org/themes/literacy-all (15/10/2020).

UNITED NATIONS, The Sustainable Development Agenda. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/ (15/10/2020).


Full Text: PDF

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.
کاغذ a4

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.