ario Calmese, Decolonizing the Gaze Assignment | Custom Essay Help

Gaze: Words and Images as Fashion Provocations

written critical will be approximately 1000 words long, typed double spaced (12 pt font) and properly referenced.

CHAPTER
1
While the problem of humanization has always, from an
axiological point of view, been humankind’s central
problem, it now takes on the character of an inescapable
concern.l Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition
of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an
historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization,
he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility.
Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization
and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted
being conscious of their incompletion.
But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives,
only the first is the people’s vocation. This vocation is constantly
negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is
1. The current movements of rebellion, especially those of youth, while they
necessarily reflect the peculiarities of their respective settings, manifest in their
essence this preoccupation with people as beings in the world and with the world—
preoccupation with what and how they are “being.” As they place consumer civilization
in judgment, denounce bureaucracies of all types, demand the transformation
of the universities (changing the rigid nature of the teacher-student relationship and
placing that relationship within the context of reality), propose the transformation of
reality itself so that universities can be renewed, attack old orders and established
institutions in the attempt to affirm human beings as the Subjects of decision, all
these movements reflect the style of our age, which is more anthropological than
anthropocentric.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1745456.
Created from newschool on 2018-04-29 07:30:53.
Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.
44’PAULO FREIRE
thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of
the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for
freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.
Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity
has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have
stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully
human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical
vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical
vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle
for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming
of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would
be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization,
although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but
the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors,
which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or
later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those
who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the
oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is
a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but
rather restorers of the humanity of both.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed:
to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The
oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power,
cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed
or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness
of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt
to “soften” the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness
of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false
generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to
have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the
oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order
is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by
death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity
become desperate at the slightest threat to its source.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed : 30th Anniversary Edition, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2014. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1745456.
Created from