Revememorar imagens e aparições de um corpo negro: travessias de um professor de matemática. Ou, como conjurar a educação financeira capitalista?

Abstract

A summary is always a pretentious and panoptic force of power that seeks to control a diversity, a multiplicity of ideas, desires, meanings, affections, writings, concepts, procedures, and, above all in this work, memories. It seems, therefore, to convey a linear, hierarchical, and controlled narrative. The summary is imposed with the expectation that it will account for everything. Certainly, these propositions relate to some possible adjectives associated with what is considered a summary, but perhaps they are not the only ones. And, in any case, here follows the effort of my summary: Since my master’s degree (2012), when I was engaged in Critical Discourse Analysis of documents from the National Strategies for Financial Education (OECD), I took on the task of constructing a proposal for addressing financial education in my mathematics classrooms in a way that critically examined capitalism and financialization. I sought to develop a pedagogical strategy derived from an experiment in solidarity economy: a Critical and Solidarity Financial Education. However, being a Black body and a mathematics teacher, while engaged in criticism and opposition to the capitalist mode of production, I became Black. It was, therefore, inevitable that the context of racial relations or an education for ethnic-racial relations converged with my critical studies on capitalism. Thus, we arrive at one of the central ideas of this thesis: capitalism and racism are driven by two methodologies—the treadmill and the mirror. Black bodies have been transformed into commodities since colonial enterprises. These methodologies operate in the production of inferiority through institutions: the first focuses on maintaining Black bodies as the cheapest commodities in the markets, while the second works to reify narratives—some of them religious (Christian)—of their socially and ideologically constructed inferiority. This thesis is simultaneously a narrative and a rhizomatic elaboration on the trajectory and experiments with a Social Research Group (GPS) composed of basic education students—a strategy to combat racism and the effects of capitalism. Thus, this thesis dedicates itself, or rather converges, to the development of the idea that black bodies are counter-commodities. They are produced as powerful works of art, acquire an aura (the frame), circulate, generate spaces for goods and symbolic exchanges, and gain value as images and bodies. This was the strategy for unsettling the capitalist mode of production (while also combating racism), developed through encounters, affections produced and exchanged along the trajectory of Abana, this Black mathematics teacher. Here, rememoration becomes the most significant operation of this counter-market capitalist space—spaces for goods and symbolic exchanges along Abana’s trajectory. It is inspired by a detachment from the imperatives of method and calculation typical of mathematics lessons, which operate through an uncertain tradition. It is a way of honoring Abana’s ancestry—from the small, apneic Black body to the Black mathematics teacher.