Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Foreword by Brian V. Street
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: texts, power, and identity
- 2 The literacy thesis: vexed questions of rationality, development, and self
- 3 Situated approaches to the literacy debate
- 4 Literacies and power in modern nation states: Euro-American lessons
- 5 Literacies and identity formation: American cases
- 6 Literacy, power, and identity: colonial legacies and indigenous transformations
- 7 Conclusion: literacy lessons – beginnings, ends, and implications
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language
6 - Literacy, power, and identity: colonial legacies and indigenous transformations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Foreword by Brian V. Street
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: texts, power, and identity
- 2 The literacy thesis: vexed questions of rationality, development, and self
- 3 Situated approaches to the literacy debate
- 4 Literacies and power in modern nation states: Euro-American lessons
- 5 Literacies and identity formation: American cases
- 6 Literacy, power, and identity: colonial legacies and indigenous transformations
- 7 Conclusion: literacy lessons – beginnings, ends, and implications
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language
Summary
In addition to being a military and political invasion, the Spanish conquest of the New World also entailed a conquest of language and a conquest by language … Throughout the conquest, language became an instrument of domination, a means of coercing speakers of indigenous languages in order to mold their minds, expressions, and thoughts into the formulas, ritual phrases, and inflections of sixteenth-century Castilian culture.
(Seed, 1990, p. 12, original emphasis)The education of colonial subjects for proselytizing … suggests a form of violence perhaps even more insidious than the destruction and persecution of the exterior manifestations of belief. It is an epistemic violence that seeks to implant an institution of knowledge and European subjectivity.
(Rabasa, 1993, p. 69)Introduction
Recognizing the interrelatedness of text, power, and identity is unavoidable when one turns to investigate the relation of colonizer to colonized. Colonial encounters, from their inception, were marked by a clash of unequal powers engaged in struggle: on the one hand, by aboriginal peoples to resist the encroachment from without which threatens the very structure of their society and the culture which sustains it, and, on the other hand, by the colonizers to remake the subject populations into Christians, both politically subservient and literate. The colonizing effort was all too often written not as a history of capitalist expansion, but as a massive, entirely laudable, educational enterprise bringing enlightenment and religion to those left behind in the civilizational process.
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- Literacy and LiteraciesTexts, Power, and Identity, pp. 121 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003