The Lessons of Jornaleros: Emancipatory Education, Migrant Artists, and the Aims of Critical Theory

Abstract

This article explores the implications of Rancièrean theory for a radical politics of migrant equality through an interpretation of a documentary film produced by migrants in Portland, Oregon. Refusing to be defined by their social role as “workers,” the day laborers in Jornaleros execute musical, poetic, and artistic interventions that reorder the “distribution of the sensible.” They also deploy language in emancipatory ways consonant with Rancière's notion of “literarity.” The documentary thus instantiates the “verification” of intellectual equality that is crucial to Rancière's notion of emancipatory education and that, Samuel Chambers argues, should become the focus of critical theory. However, Jornaleros also poses a contrasting model of radical education, drawing on Freirean popular education principles. Even as they exemplify Rancièrean egalitarian practices, the film's worker-activist-artists thus model strategies for adding substantive depth, interactive vigor, temporal extension, and political heft to projects of radical emancipation and exercises in critical theory.

Inequality, Loneliness, and Political Appearance: Picturing Radical Democracy with Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière

“…11 Yet Rancière has been similarly criticized for failing to attend to how democratic politics is shaped by the social conditions in which it is enacted. 12 While Rancière's depiction of democratic politics enables us to recognize how social conditions can become the object of political struggle, McNay thinks that he moves too quickly from the assumption of the equal intelligence of everyone to an assumption of their equal capacity to act and speak. 13 Without a theory of power and, therefore, of the relation between oppression and oppositional agency, she contends, Rancière is unable to take the full measure of the social conditions that may facilitate or frustrate the kind of emancipatory politics that he valorizes.…”

Rethinking the ordinary and the extraordinary: Reading Rancière’s dissensual politics through Kuhn

“…The work of Jacques Rancière has inspired a variety of disciplines, including Political Theory (Bassett, 2014; Chambers, 2013; Schaap, 2011), Philosophy (Apostolidis, 2016; Deranty and Ross, 2012; Panagia, 2009), Aesthetics (Davis, 2010; Panagia, 2006), Education Studies (Biesta, 2010, 2011; Bingham and Biesta, 2010; Pelletier, 2009), Citizenship Studies and Resistance Studies (Cámara, 2013; Flores, 2003; May, 2010; Nicholls, 2013; Nyers and Rygiel, 2012; Puggioni, 2015, 2018; Schwiertz, 2016). In this article, I explore Rancière’s theorisation of the political, taking into consideration the way in which it has been applied to political struggles and social movements, including the Occupy movements (Bassett, 2014; Lorey, 2014; Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013); undocumented mobilisation (Galindo, 2012; Kmak, 2020; Millner, 2011; Rigby and Schlembach, 2013); Black Lives Matter protests (Havercroft and Owen, 2016; Mackin, 2016); and the Palestinian intifada, among others (May, 2010).…”