Chronic silencing and struggling without witness: Race, education and the production of political knowledge (Jamaica, Nancy Fraser)

The political is a category that works as a major hub for critical educational and social thought conversations and agendas. This is particularly so, given that the diverse and divergent range of critical approaches to the study of education share an important investment in probing and placing educational concerns in relation to broader social power dynamics. This dissertation pursues an interrogation of how a sense of the political gets produced. The questioning of the production of what counts as the political, particularly a critical sense of the political, is triggered by a concern for what this study argues is the troubling positioning or status of race as a valid and rigorous social problematic on the critical terrain. Thus the study links the production of the disturbing status of race with how a sense of the political is arrived at.; Employing an interdisciplinary combination of historical-archaeological and theoretical-philosophical modes of inquiry, the study recruits two kinds of sites or conditions for thinking to empirically carry out this interrogation of the political and status of race. One kind may be considered as a more practical and popular site or object and the other, a more theoretical and academic one. The more practical site is that of non-government popular education and community organizing work in Jamaica as it emerged in two waves---one in the late 1930s and the other in the late 1960s. The body of arguments by feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser on the politics of redistribution and recognition, primarily drawn from her book, "Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the 'Postsocialist' Condition," serves as the more theoretical site.; The study argues that enacted in both types of critical sites is a particular pattern of subordination and silencing of the role of race as a social problematic, framed in the dissertation as a beleaguered status. It finds that implicated in the beleaguered status of race, are the ways in which differential significance is given to such structuring founding narratives as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery, colonialism, capitalism and industrialization, in the constitution of a sense of the critical political.