Voices of difference: time and transformation among popular educators in Pernambuco

Abstract

In this article I put forth two analytical movements. First, I draw parallels between narratives of grassroots educators in Recife and Olinda, Achille Mbembe’s “time of entanglement” and Homi Bhabha’s “interstitial inscriptions of cultural difference”. This encounter elicits an argument about time and transformation among educators: as they were encouraged to talk about themselves in terms of race, gender, sexuality and culture, past, present and future experiences were intertwined and, hence, they became a woman, a black person, a homosexual, an artist, an educator. The encounter of the ethnographic material with postcolonial theory also triggers a second analytical movement, by means of a series of bifurcations in which yet another argument is elicited on time and transformation in anthropological texts. As in any narrative, that of anthropologists does not occur without effect. Thus, I explore the emerging time in the life histories told by the educators and in the life trajectories analyzed by anthropologists.