Book Review: Popular Education in Timor-lest: Past and Present Experience by S. P. Urban, A. B. Da Silva, & I. V. Lisingen

Abstract

intellectual traditions all premised on the historical necessity of social change. But dealing with each of these questions, and the relations between them, requires that we contend with ideology, thus our theorization of this concept is crucial. A key contribution of Bannerji's work to adult education is to focus our attention not simply on the circulation or ‘consumption’ of ideology, but its production. Much as Marx asks us to move beyond the appearance of capitalism as the process of circulation and exchange and into the ‘hidden abode’ of production, Bannerji asks the same of us in discerning the ‘ideological condition’ of capitalist social relations. The production of ideology and specifically how ideology is produced, and reproduced, within human social relations in her key concerns. This focus allows her to embrace a praxis that is not oriented to only what we say and think, that is to consciousness, but to what we do and how we consciously live. In changing social relations, then, we can imagine how changes in consciousness may emerge, echoing Paula Allman's insistence on critical education as a revolutionary praxis generating pedagogical ‘glimpses’ of transformed social relations. Bannerji's work to elucidate the ideological condition of capitalist social relations emerges through her detailed engagement with social relations of racism, patriarchy, caste, class, and colonialism. Each chapter in this collection takes history, culture, and experience as starting points to unearth the production process of ideologies of social difference and their historical role in the development and expansion of capitalism. In this career spanning work, Bannerji demonstrates an unrelenting pursuit of what she terms the ‘false universalism’ of bourgeois liberal interests. This interrogation leads her towards generative critical engagements with ideas of multiculturalism and nationalism, coloniality and subaltern studies, the limits of capitalist democracy, and the politics of decolonization. A particularly critical intervention that spans across these chapters is Bannerji's theorization of culture as a crucial material site of study, intervention, and transformation. As an anti-racist and feminist Marxist scholar of profound depth, she fundamentally deepens and renews many aspects of critical, feminist, anti-racist, and Marxist theory that are necessary for the current and coming struggles for human emancipation in our world.