Illuminating thus far understudied international relations in global higher education, the book titled Internationalization of Higher Education for Development illustrates how the Brazilian government, under the presidency of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), legitimized Africa-Brazil relations often referring to the presumably shared history of transatlantic slavery as the condition for solidarity cooperation and international integration. Ress reveals how this notion of history produces a vision of Brazil as a multicultural nation able to redress longstanding racialized inequalities while casting ‘Africa’ as the continent that remains forever in the past. She explores how this ambiguous notion was translated into curricula and classroom practices, and, in particular how it shaped international students’ experiences at a newly-created university in the Northeast of Brazil. Ress demonstrates how the historicized framing in conjunction with the powerfully racialized class structures that characterize Brazilian society, the challenging material conditions surrounding the university, and the future aspirations of students created an environment that made solidarity an economic necessity while repeating the century-old colonial gesture of othering ‘Africa’ in new yet all too familiar ways – reworking and reemploying the idea of race in the name of Brazil’s progress and development. This book showcases in an innovative way the challenges and opportunities of building international relations in postcolonial education contexts. A much-needed advances over current scholarship analysing race, blackness, and solidarity, it offers a timely contribution to postfoundational and postcolonial studies in comparative and international education.
Susanne Ress is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Center of Comparative and International Education at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Germany. In 2016, she was awarded the Gail P. Kelly Award for Outstanding Dissertations of the Comparative and International Education Society.
Daniel Friedrich is Associate Professor of Curriculum at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA. He is the author of
Democratic Education as a Curricular Problem (2014) and co-editor of a special issue of
Education Policy Analysis Archives on the global network Teach For All (with Rolf Straubhaar).
I
rving Epstein is the Rhodes Professor Emeritus of Peace and Social Justice at Illinois Wesleyan University, USA. In addition to
Education, Affect, and Film, he is the author of
Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse (2019). His other book length publications include the edited volumes
Chinese Education: Problems, Policies and Prospects (1991
), Recapturing the Personal (2007),
The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children's Issues Worldwide (2007),
and The Whole World is Texting: Youth Protest in the Information Age (2015). From 1988-1998, he served as an associate editor of the
Comparative Education Review and is currently
an Emeritus member of the Scholars at Risk advisory board, an international network devoted to protecting scholars from persecution while engaging in academic freedom advocacy.
Stephen Carney is Professor of Educational Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark.
His research focuses on global educational reform and has involved ethnographic work in Denmark, England, Nepal and China. He is active in the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), especially its Special Interest Group concerned with 'Post-foundational approaches to comparative and international education'. He is also President of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE).
