Postcolonial Models Cultural Transfers and Transnational Perspectives in Latin America A Research Agenda

Paedagogica Historica
International Journal of the History of Education
ISSN: 0030-9230 (Print) 1477-674X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpdh20
Postcolonial models, cultural transfers and

transnational perspectives in Latin America: a
research agenda
Gabriela Ossenbach & María del Mar del Pozo
To cite this article: Gabriela Ossenbach & María del Mar del Pozo (2011) Postcolonial models,
cultural transfers and transnational perspectives in Latin America: a research agenda, Paedagogica
Historica, 47:5, 579-600, DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2011.606787
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2011.606787
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Paedagogica HistoricaAquatic Insects
Vol. 47, No. 5, October 2011, 579–600
Postcolonial models, cultural transfers and transnational

perspectives in Latin America: a research agenda
Gabriela Ossenbacha* and María del Mar del Pozob
a
Departamento de Historia de la Educación, UNED, Madrid, Spain; bDepartamento de
Psicopedagogía y Educación Física, Universidad de Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
(Received 17 July 2011; final version received 18 July 2011)
In this article we wish to propose a debate on postcolonialism and its role in

the history of Latin American education. Our starting point is the acknowledge-
ment of the reality that postcolonial historiographic perspectives have yet to be
applied in studies of one of history’s great empires, namely, the Spanish
Empire. This is surprising for several reasons: firstly, because debate about post-
colonialism has been very present in the culture, thought and politics of Latin
America for many years; and secondly, because while the postcolonial approach
can be found in the historiographic debate surrounding the Portuguese Empire
and in recent comparative studies on the history of education in Portugal and
Brazil, it has scarcely been brought up in the historiography of the Spanish
Empire.
We approach the subject by applying a genealogical and conceptual analy-
sis of the three defining terms in this field of study: “postcolonial”, “transna-
tional” and “cultural transfers”. The main body of the article analyses
postcolonial approaches in cultural studies, contemplating a double perspective:
that of the Iberian Peninsula, in which we analyse the emerging tendencies
and trends in Spain and Portugal, and that of Latin America, for which we
provide an overview of the various postcolonial discourses, focusing on some
of their principal areas of reflection. Finally, we analyse the situation of post-
colonial studies in the history of Latin American and Iberian education by
pointing out current lines of investigation worthy of being included in this
field and emphasising themes and approaches that concur with postcolonial
theory. We analyse the trajectory of Spanish educational historiography in rela-
tion to that of Portugal, and propose future investigative agendas. The articles
included in this special issue could be considered a sort of preview of this
novel and engaging theme.
Keywords: postcolonial studies; transnational history; history of postcolonial
education; history of latin american education
Postcolonial, transnational and cultural transfers: theoretical and conceptual

approaches
Postcolonialism secured its place in academic and intellectual discourse in the mid-
1980s, along with other distinguished “post” tendencies such as poststructuralism
and postmodernism. The genealogy of the critical theory that has come to be known
*Corresponding author. Email: gossenbach@edu.uned.es
ISSN 0030-9230 print/ISSN 1477-674X online

Ó 2011 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2011.606787
http://www.informaworld.com
580 G. Ossenbach and M.M. del Pozo
as postcolonialism can be found, according to a number of authors, in an increased

sensitivity towards the points of view and the discourse of groups of intellectuals
from those countries that even as recently as 20 years ago were known as “the
Third World”. The term “postcolonialism” came to refer to the collective thoughts
and views of these intellectuals; these views included the reformulation of old
geopolitical concepts such as “centre” and “periphery”, a new definition of national
and regional borders and the introduction of new categories with which to explain
the construction of collective identities. It also questioned the classic narrative
regarding progress and modernity, subjugated as it had been until then by
Eurocentric concepts and by an enduring colonial mentality. In its origin, the term
postcolonial actually had three different meanings: “as a literal description of condi-
tions in formerly colonial societies”; “as a description of a global condition after
the period of colonialism”, in which case it substituted the term and the paradigm
“Third World”; and “as a description of a discourse on the above-named conditions
that is informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of
those conditions”.1
Authors are unanimous in pointing out the ambiguity and multiplicity of mean-
ings that the term “postcolonial” acquired after its first use sometime between 1950
and 1960,2 precisely when the decolonisation of the European empires took place.
Some authors stuck firmly to its original meaning in the understanding that it
encompassed two levels of comprehension: “a particular period in history – after
the colonial era – and the state of mind from which, as it were, the colonial has
been expunged”.3 From this starting point grew two new meanings. The first was
closely aligned with political and ideological postures which understood postcolo-
nial critical thought to mean the production of discourses of resistance to colonial-
ism and imperialism. The second, which would come to constitute a new
intellectual and cultural tradition strongly influenced by globalising tendencies, is
associated with concepts such as diasporas, internationalism, transnational migra-
tions and cultural exchange. The different vantage points regarding the contribu-
tions of “non-European” artists and intellectuals to an European culture has led to
the concept of a “transnational imaginary” which proposes to redefine the idea of
culture as “a space for a renegotiation of identities and the projection of hybrid
identities”.4
It is in this place – where identities are “renegotiated” – that the concepts of
postcolonialism and transnationalism find their connection. However, in order to
describe common traditions it is important that we analyse the intellectual geneal-
ogy of the terms. For certain authors, the term “transnational” is synonymous with
globalisation, while for others it is identified more closely with cosmopolitanism
1
Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capital-
ism,” Critical Inquiry 2 (1994): 332 and Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’,” Social
Text 31/32 (1992): 100.
2
Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism. An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001),
59.
3
Joost Coté, “Memory and History, Community and Nation: Telling the story of the Indisch
Dutch in Australia,” in Recalling the Indies – Colonial Culture & Postcolonial Identities,
eds. Joost Coté and Loes Westerbeek (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005), 15.
4
Landry-Wilfrid Miampika and Maya García de Vinuesa, “Migration, Racism and Postcolo-
nial Studies in Spain,” in Racism. Postcolonialism. Europe, eds. Graham Huggan and Ian
Law (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 100.
Paedagogica Historica 581
and international critique. Since the mid-1990s “transnational” has served as a

substitute conceptual framework for “postcolonial” in the analysis of contemporary
culture, to enough of an extent that a “transnational turn” has even been proposed.5
The origin of the term is relatively easy to trace; it was Randolph Bourne who in
1916 wrote an essay entitled Transnational America.6 The term then expanded into
the realm of private law – which in the 1950s included a branch of “transnational
law” – and to the area of economics, represented by multinational corporations,
whose use of the term began in 1974; before becoming incorporated into the realm
of non-government organisations. In 1980 the World Forum of the Union of Inter-
national Associations adopted the term transnational, much to the chagrin and oppo-
sition of delegates of the “Third World”, for whom it was closely identified with
the economic colonialism of multinational corporations. Whereas the term “interna-
tional” was understood to define a genuine relation between nations, “transnational”
seemed to refer to spaces without national jurisdiction; to processes and entities that
transcended national borders and were not subject to the control of any sort of gov-
ernment body.7 Johan Galtung, one of the intellectuals present at the World Forum,
proposed, in opposition to the idea of international organisations, the idea of the
“individual human”, an entity that would transcend all borders and become the true,
basic unit of political action.8
The “transnational turn”, which became a “hot topic” in the early 1990s, was
attributed by some historians to the influence of postcolonial academics and intellec-
tuals. Comparisons have even been proposed of the biographical trajectories of the
terms “transnational” and “postcolonial”, where the ever-broader interpretations of
the latter seem to evidence a kind of competition between the two words in the field
of academia.9 However, while the original meaning of the “postcolonial” concept
has broadened considerably, the definition of “transnational” has remained very true
to the terms by which it was first coined and is still easily identifiable. The notion of
“transnational history” took on a different meaning from that of “international
history”, which deals with the relations between nations. “Transnational history”
examines units that spill over and seep through national borders. It conceptualises
categories and identities, discovers networks united by bonds stronger than social
class or ideology and links narratives and experiences that transcend time and loca-
tion, while it “considers cross-national comparison as subject rather than method”.10
The principal concern of a transnational approach is the interpretation of history in
terms of movement, ebb and circulation, not only as subjects or themes of study but
5
Ursula K. Heise, “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies,” American
Literary History 20, nos. 1/2 (2008): 381–404.
6
Ian Tyrrell, “What is Transnational History?” http://iantyrrell.wordpress.com/what-is-transna-
tional-history/ (accessed July 7, 2011).
7
Union of International Associations, World Forum Mondial 1980. Proceedings. From Inter-
national to Transnational. Document n° 23 for the Study of International non Governmental
Relations (Bruxelles: Union des Associations Internationales, 1982), 10.
8
Johan Galtung, The True Worlds. A Transnational Perspective (New York: The Free Press,
1980), XXIII.
9
C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia
Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” The American Historical Review III-5
(2006) http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.5/introduction.html (accessed July
7, 2011).
10
Micol Seigel, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radi-
cal History Review 91 (2005): 62–6.
as perspectives or points of view – in Weber’s sense of the term – and as an analyti-

cal framework in which to generate new historical discourse.
In some circles, “transnational history” has begun to be considered, perhaps
somewhat pretentiously, as a new paradigm of historiography. The essence of its
methodology can be found in the “cultural transfer” model as understood in its
recent reformulation by French-German and North American historians, ie, “histoire
croisée”. The origins of the “cultural transfer” concept can be found in attacks on a
kind of comparative history which simply presented an artificial juxtaposition of
isolated national cases that avoided any dynamic interpretation of the mutual con-
tact between cultures. The analyses of the cultural transfer method, based on the
categories of introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation, are careful to
acknowledge the importance of comparing both cultures, the importer and the
exporter, in order to understand how the system of relations reaches across geo-
graphical locations. French historians Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman
have stated that the study of “cultural transfers” belongs to a “family of ‘relational’
approaches”.11 They were the ones to introduce into the debate the term “histoire
croisée”,12 which can be interpreted as “entangled history”; while this refers on the
one hand to narratives that share strong bonds, it also refers to “connected histo-
ries”, “shared history”, and the historian’s job of piecing such histories together.13
The use of the “histoire croisée” concept may well help to shed light on some of
the blind spots that transfer studies do not account for. Among these are the prob-
lems of reciprocity and reversibility, two categories which, although only vaguely
defined, seem to indicate the presence of multidirectional interrelationships, “succes-
sive transfers” and triangular configurations, all of which could ultimately make the
research agenda on cultural transfer extraordinarily complex.14 It also allows for the
introduction of other related concepts, such as that of “cultural spaces”, which may
contribute to the creation of new mental maps of the continents where the subjects
of analysis are no longer nations and other territorial categories but rather the places
and networks of cultural exchange. Within this “family of ‘relational’ approaches”
we also find concepts such as “connected histories” and “shared histories”, both of
which have grown out of the area of postcolonial studies.
Historian Peter Burke recently studied the concept of cultural hybridity as a met-
aphor for describing cultural exchanges. This is indeed one of the key terms in the
lexicon of postcolonial studies, always appearing in association with other terms
that refer to cultural exchange.15 And despite the fact that the concept is actually
cited in the title of Burke’s book, he himself criticises it as being “slippery and
11
Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and
the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 31.
12
Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empire et
réflexivité,” Annales 58, no. 1 (2003): 7–36.
13
Philipp Ther, “Comparisons, Cultural Transfers, and the Study of Networks. Toward a
Transnational History of Europe,” in Comparative and Transnational History. Central Euro-
pean Approaches and New Perspectives, eds. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jurgen Kocka
(Berghahn Books, 2009), 209.
14
Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and
the Challenge of Reflexivity,” 37.
15
Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman, “Introduction: Hybridity Today,” in Reconstructing Hybrid-
ity. Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, eds. Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2007), 4.
ambiguous, literal and metaphorical at the same time, descriptive and explicative”.16
He goes on to make a case for its substitution by other expressions of greater clarity
such as “appropriation” or “cultural translation”, terms which better reflect the
importance of human action.
But looking beyond the terminology, historians need to develop critical perspec-
tives regarding the way in which these cultural exchanges actually take place. This is
where education could become a central element in this field of study, given the
privileged position it occupies in the observation and interpretation of phenomena
such as acculturation and enculturation, the transmission and adaptation of culture,
and the relationship between dominant and receptive cultures. Pedagogic culture also
has the advantage of being built upon a foundation of ideas, terms, institutions and
practices that “travel”, crossing borders, connecting spaces and serving as models of
transnational history. The rediscovery of this model and this subject opens up new
possibilities for evaluating the relationship between the different players in the edu-
cational field, as well as for building new categories of intercultural transfers that
will include new ways of forging individual and collective identities.
Postcolonial approaches in cultural studies: the Iberian case

This special issue grew out of a reflection on recent contributions to postcolonial
studies in British historiography of education, and is especially inspired by the
monographic issue that the journal Paedagogica Historica dedicated to the subject
in 2009.17 The discovery of this new postcolonial approach – about which scant
Spanish-language material was available – led us to formulate a number of ques-
tions: Why are postcolonial historiographic frameworks not applied to the study of
one of history’s great empires, namely, the Spanish Empire? Why does the current
concern for reinterpreting dialogues and encounters between the ‘centre’ and the
‘periphery’ go practically unmentioned among Spanish historians? And a final,
somewhat rhetorical question, we felt compelled to ask: Why the continued silence
and neglect in Spain regarding the history of Latin America? As we glanced briefly
at the investigative tendencies of Spain and Portugal’s educational historians from a
perspective of “entangled history”, our surprise only grew at the markedly different
historiographic trajectories of the two countries.
The commemoration of the V Centenary of the Discovery of the Americas, pro-
moted in Spain and Portugal as an “encounter of cultures”, proved to be a starting
point for a series of celebrations that would revolutionise many of the investigative
traditions that were dominant in Spain at the time. The anniversary marked the ori-
gin of a new tendency in cultural and intellectual historiography, namely, the study
of the Spanish exile in America following the Spanish Civil War. A review of some
of the key studies from the 1990s reveals how this subject was approached by
Spaniards as an example of unidirectional cultural transfer, in which the subject of
study was the contribution to American culture of the exiled Spaniards; in referring
16
Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 104–5.
17
Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch, and William Richardson, eds., “‘Empires Overseas’ and
‘Empires at Home’: Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives on Social Change in the
History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009).
to them as “desterrados”, this exile movement would come to be seen as a sort of

diaspora.18
The end-of-century commemorations culminated with the memory of the “98”,
when at the end of the nineteenth century Spain lost its last colonies – along with its
imperial ambitions – and entered into a phase that should be characterised as postcolo-
nial. The huge amount of historiographic material generated by this centennial,19
which is by no means over, has focused mainly on the study of nationalisms and on
the construction of a Spanish national identity in a post-imperial context. It has above
all concerned itself with addressing the great question that the Spanish intellectual and
political elites were posing at the end of the nineteenth century: “How is Spain to
overcome its imperial-heroic mythology in order to construct a new identity as a
nation?”20 Although recent historiography has elaborated a discourse on the nine-
teenth-century Spanish nation, even some of the more prestigious Spanish historians,
such as José Álvarez Junco,21 have ignored or silenced the role that Latin America
played in conforming a collective Spanish imaginary. This has led other academics to
point out that “colonialism was a major vector for imagining the nation and its his-
tory”.22 This negation of the relationship between nationalism and colonialism can be
found throughout the entire Spanish academic discourse regarding postcolonial
Spain.23
On the other hand, the “centre vs. periphery” debate so characteristic of postco-
lonialism did find its way into Spanish historiography, but within the geographic
confines of the peninsula, where Madrid was seen as the metropolis, the centre of
power and domination, while regions with their own cultural identity such as
Catalonia and the Basque Country represented the periphery. This fact demonstrates
that “postcoloniality is not spatially limited to formerly colonized parts of the
world”.24 In Spain this viewpoint has been put into practice in recent studies on
contemporary literature, which are inspired for the first time by postcolonial theo-
ries. These studies attempt to shed light on the apparent contradiction between the
fact that Catalonia, as part of the Spanish Empire, had contributed to the colonisa-
tion of America while at the same time showing “many of the traits common to
previously colonised countries if we examine it in terms of cultural imperialism”.25
18
Sonsoles Cabeza Sánchez-Albornoz, “Balance historiográfico del exilio español. 1990–
1999,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 22 (2000): 135–57.
19
Javier Moreno Luzón, “El fin de la melancolía,” in Construir España. Nacionalismo espa-
ñol y procesos de nacionalización, ed. Javier Moreno Luzón (Madrid: Centro de Estudios
Políticos y Constitucionales, 2007), 13–24.
20
María del Mar del Pozo Andrés, Currículum e identidad nacional. Regeneracionismos,
nacionalismos y escuela pública (1890–1939) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2000), 27.
21
José Álvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus,
2001).
22
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “‘La España Ultramarina’: Colonialism and Nation-Building
in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” European History Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2004): 191–214.
23
See, for example, Ángel Loureiro, “Spanish Nationalism and the Ghost of Empire,” Jour-
nal of Spanish Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 65–76.
24
Anette Hoffmann and Esther Peeren, “Introduction: Representation Matters,” in Represen-
tation Matters: (Re)Articulating Collective Identities in a Postcolonial World, eds. Anette
Hoffmann and Esther Peeren (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 14.
25
Stewart King, Escribir la catalanidad. Lenguas e identidades culturales en la narrativa
contemporánea de Cataluña (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005), 3.
In June 2011 an international symposium on “The End of the Portuguese Empire

in Comparative Perspective” was held in Lisbon. A great number of themes were
presented from a postcolonial perspective, while special attention was paid to the
shared historical experiences that could help connect colonial policies to the reactions
they provoked in peripheral regions. This, along with other information from Portu-
guese scholarship, leads us to affirm that the discourse developed in Portugal is sig-
nificantly different from that of Spain: it is clearly influenced by postcolonial
theoretical frameworks and it places a special emphasis on the “specific interdepen-
dencies and mutual constitution between Portugal and Brazil and their shifting loca-
tions in the wider political scene”, to the extent that both trajectories could well be
considered “entangled histories”.26 Some of the differences between Spain and Portu-
gal may perhaps be best explained by the dischrony of their postcolonial historical
experiences.27 For Portugal this did not take place until the 1960s, resulting in the
construction of a national identity defined as “a semi-periphery imagining the centre”,
one in which an imperial past continues to inform a part of the collective imaginary.28
Recent years have seen the formulation in Portugal of a new discourse that has saud-
ade, or nostalgia, as the basis of national identity. This discourse has been strongly
influenced by immigration and has been built upon the connections between the nine-
teenth-century Portuguese diaspora and the current Brazilian diaspora.29
In Spain postcolonial theory is now being introduced into sociological investiga-
tion, with explicit emphasis being placed on the novelty of the approach and on the
scarce attention granted until now to such perspectives in Spanish scholarship. The
postcolonial approach is being used as a methodological tool for exploring issues of
ethnicity and identity among immigrants from former Spanish colonies and the rela-
tionship between these and national immigration policies.30 In 2009 none of the
important figures of the postcolonial movement had yet been translated into Spanish,
with the exception of Edward Said and an Argentinean version of Homi Bhabha.31
The books of the movement’s central figure, Gayatri Spivak, were not available in
Spanish.32 Nevertheless, the last three years have seen the publication of a number of
26
Bela Feldman-Bianco, “Empire, postcoloniality and diasporas: The Portuguese case,”
Papers 85 (2007): 45.
27
We will explain this concept in footnote 38.
28
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, “Empire, Colonial Wars and Post-Colonialism in the Portu-
guese Contemporary Imagination,” Portuguese Studies 18 (2002): 132–214.
29
Bela Feldman-Bianco, “Empire, Postcoloniality and Diasporas: The Portuguese Case,” 44.
30
Landry-Wilfrid Miampika and Maya García de Vinuesa, “Migration, Racism and Postcolo-
nial Studies in Spain,” 92–101; Sandra Gil Araújo, “The Coloniality of Power and Ethnic
Affinity in Migration Policy: The Spanish Case,” in Decolonizing European Sociology.
Transdisciplinary Approaches, eds. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Manuel Boatcá, and
Sérgio Costa (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 179–94; Postcolonialidades históricas: (in)visibilida-
des hispanoamericanas/colonialismos ibéricos, eds. Ileana Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez
(Barcelona: Anthropos, 2008).
31
Homi K. Bhabha, El lugar de la cultura (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2002).
32
Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, “Contra la exclusión,” Exit Book 10 (2009): 60. The classic
work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History
of the Vanishing Present, originally published in 1999, has just been published in Spanish as
Crítica de la razón poscolonial. Hacia una crítica del presente evanescente (Madrid: Akal,
2010).
books on postcolonial studies,33 leading us to suspect the presence of an emerging

interest in incorporating this paradigm into cultural studies carried out in Spain. Timid
advances in the field of historiography include a recent project, postcolonial transat-
lantic studies, that is beginning to show promising possibilities.34
Postcolonial approaches in cultural studies: the Latin American case

The relationship between “centre and periphery” upon which postcolonial theory
has been developed has had an important influence on thought, culture and poli-
tics in Latin America, as well as on the way that history has been written. Natu-
rally it has also left its mark on education. This complex, tense relationship, in
which the “centre” is represented not only by the Iberian metropolis but by Eur-
ope and the United States as well, has shown itself in myriad ways and in the
most varied discourses, invariably characterised by dichotomies such as colony/
metropolis; dependence/independence;35 civilization/barbarism;36 development/
underdevelopment.
Gregorio Weinberg made an attempt to establish a chronological framework for
the complex relationship in Latin American culture between internal development
and external influence, and between originality and imitation. He defined three suc-
cessive stages up until the twentieth century: “imposed culture”, “accepted culture”
and “criticised or disputed culture”.37 The phase of “imposed culture”, which was
of a functional nature for the metropolis, corresponds to the colonial era, while the
second phase, that of the “accepted culture”, is associated with the organisation of
the national societies as they strove to progress after their political emancipation
from the Iberian metropolis. In this phase Weinberg emphasises the assimilation of
foreign cultural and philosophical tendencies by Latin American countries, which
adopted them due to their usefulness for solving the theoretical and practical
problems involved in organising the new nations. This receptive attitude towards
tendencies coming from more advanced countries, evident throughout the nineteenth
century and the first decades of the twentieth century, was due to a growing aware-
ness of the way in which Latin America was “out of sync”, as it were, slipping
33
See, for example, Sidi M. Omar, Los estudios post-coloniales. Una introducción crítica
(Castellón: Universidad Jaume I, 2008); and Sandro Mezzadra, ed., Estudios poscoloniales.
Ensayos fundamentales (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2008).
34
Ileana Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez, eds., Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales. I.
Narrativas comando/sistemas mundo: colonialidad/modernidad; II. Mito, archivo, disciplina:
cartografías culturales (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2010 and 2011).
35
Mariano Picón-Salas, Dependencia e independencia en la historia hispano-americana
(Caracas: Cruz del Sur, 1952); Gabriela Ossenbach, “Presentación: Educación y procesos de
emancipación en América Latina. A propósito del Bicentenario de las Independencias ameri-
canas,” Historia de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria 29 (2010): 23–33.
36
“Civilización y barbarie” was a striking slogan that circulated throughout all of Latin
America. It was coined by the founder of the Argentinean public school, Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento, in his work Civilización y barbarie. Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga. Aspecto físi-
co, costumbres, i ábitos de la República Argentina (1845).
37
Gregorio Weinberg, “Sobre el quehacer filosófico latinoamericano. Algunas consideraci-
ones históricas y reflexiones actuales,” Revista de la Universidad de México, XXVI/6-7
(1972): 19–24. See also certain observations by Weinberg regarding the chronology of Latin
American culture in Miguel Somoza Rodríguez, “Entrevista a Gregorio Weinberg,” Historia
de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria 24 (2005): 591–3.
further behind the progress of Europe and the United States. The independence of
these new countries had brought with it political structures that imitated those of
the most advanced countries, and a need was now felt to find ideas and inspirations
that would help these countries “catch up” and put them in the same time frame,
“homogenizing the diversity of times”.38 Liberal intellectuals from countries that
had been Spain’s colonies did not find this receptiveness to foreign tendencies con-
tradictory with regard to the new spirit of emancipation; they actually considered it
a way of overcoming a colonial legacy. They even developed an entire discourse on
“spiritual emancipation from Spain”, with clear echoes of English and French litera-
ture that had created a sort of “black legend” surrounding the history of Spain
(most notably H.T. Buckle’s History of Civilization, which appeared between 1857
and 1861).39 The peculiar access to independence by Brazil, which declared itself
an Empire under the reign of the descendants of the Portuguese royal family Pedro
I and his son Pedro II, resulted in Brazilian intellectuals viewing the Portuguese
legacy quite differently from the way in which other Hispanic Americans saw their
Spanish heritage. Brazilian intellectuals adopted an eclectic position which facili-
tated a reconciliation of their present with their colonial past.40
In Weinberg’s view, the phase of “accepted culture” came to an end around 1930,
coinciding with the catastrophic crisis of the capitalist world. This marks the begin-
ning of the “criticised or disputed culture”, in which “docility is gone forever, while it
is ever more difficult to admit influences or even passively recognise them”.41 One
especially notorious precedent for this critical discourse can be found in the reaction
of Latin American thought to the surge of Anglo-Saxon utilitarian values, promoted
primarily by territorial expansion and by the economic penetration of the United
States, which culminated with the domination of Cuba and Puerto Rico at the end of
the nineteenth century. This gave rise to a new generalised consciousness of a need to
gain what the Cuban Jose Martí called a “second independence”, this time from the
United States. A generation of influential thinkers would soon emerge from this con-
text; the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, in his work Ariel (1900), appealed to Ameri-
can youth to adopt spiritual values other than those of nordomanía, while the Mexican
José Vasconcelos made a case for the creative power of a mestizo culture for forging a
38
Gregorio Weinberg, Tiempo, destiempo y contratiempo (Buenos Aires: Leviatán, 1993),
19–55. Similar reflections on the need to “catch up” can be found in the concept of “dis-
chronic development” elaborated by Graciela Soriano, Hispanoamérica: historia, desarrollo
discrónico e historia política (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Facultad de Cien-
cias Jurídicas y Políticas, 1987). The issue of time is also a central problem for the studies
about relations between centre and periphery proposed by António Nóvoa, who calls our
attention to the need to “understand the interconnections of different times that inhabit
‘empires’ and ‘colonies’”. António Nóvoa, “Endnote. Empires Overseas and Empires at
Home,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 819.
39
See, for example, Gabriela Ossenbach, “El concepto de ‘emancipación espiritual’ en el
debate sobre la educación en Hispanoamérica en la primera mitad del siglo XIX,” in Para
uma História da Educaçâo Colonial. Hacia una Historia de la Educación Colonial, ed.
António Nóvoa, Marc Depaepe, Erwin V. Johanningmeier, and Diana Soto Arango (Oporto
and Lisboa: Sociedade Portuguesa de Ciências da Educaçâo/EDUCA, 1996), 223–35 (also
published in Revista Brasileira de História da Educaçâo 1 (2001): 143–59).
40
Eclecticism, a sort of official philosophy during the Brazilian Empire, succumbed in 1889
(along with the empire) when the Republic was proclaimed and positivism took over. Antó-
nio Paim, A Filosofia Brasileira (Lisboa: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portugesa, 1991),
33–60; Leopoldo Zea, El pensamiento latinoamericano (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976), 203–11.
41
Weinberg, “Sobre el quehacer filosófico latinoamericano,” 21.
new Latin American consciousness in his book Raza Cósmica.42 This new current of
thought marked an abrupt departure from the strong positivist tendencies that had been
so present in policies for organising Latin American nations in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. In appealing to the spiritual values of youth, these ideas became
associated with student movements and reached their culmination in the Reform of the
University of Córdoba (Argentina), which took place in 1918. This movement repre-
sented a clamour in favour of breaking with “the remaining chains that, here in the
20th century, were still tying us to a monarchic, monastic domination”,43 in allusion to
the colonial past. Out of this sentiment would grow an extensive continental move-
ment that called for Latin American unity through which to stand up to imperialism.
In this context of anti-imperialistic, socially oriented discourse, another move-
ment, indigenism, began to take root in the 1920s and 1930s. This movement was
encouraged by the Mexican Revolution, by an emerging Marxist thought repre-
sented principally by the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, and by the initiatives of
certain intellectuals who were actively involved in addressing social problems in
the Andean countries, in Mexico and in Guatemala. The emancipation of the indige-
nous, the abolition of pre-capitalist labour practices that bound them to the hacien-
das, the right to own the land they worked and the right to receive an education
were all important elements in the new discourses and policies, which favoured an
emancipation that the native Latin American inhabitants had not yet known.
With regard to the history of philosophical ideas, from the late 1950s the dialec-
tic between dependence and independence focused more and more on the original-
ity of Latin American thought. Among the intellectuals that stood out in this debate
were the Uruguayan Arturo Ardao, the Peruvian Augusto Salazar Bondy and the
Mexican Leopoldo Zea. These authors emphasised the importance of Ortega y
Gasset’s ideas in helping Latin Americans to understand the validity of forming a
philosophical framework out of their own circumstances and situations.44
Another important turning point in the interpretation of Latin American history
through the “centre/periphery” perspective came about in the 1970s with the so-called
“dependency theory”, which was of a markedly economic nature and which would
exercise an especially strong influence on the social sciences.45 However, many
dependency theorists tended to favour an exclusive interpretation of different Ameri-
can developments as reactions against unidirectional pressures coming from the exte-
rior. In failing to take into account the importance of external as well as American
factors, and in considering nineteenth century dependence as a mere continuation of a
colonial legacy (“neocolonialism”), these authors failed to acknowledge the
42
Other later works of Vasconcelos delved into the question of the Latin American essence and
its antagonism with regard to the pragmatic values of the Anglo-Saxon world: Indología (1926),
Bolivarismo y monroísmo (1934) and De Robinson a Odiseo: pedagogía estructurativa (1935).
43
“Manifiesto Liminar de la Reforma Universitaria. Federación Universitaria de Córdoba,
1918 (La juventud universitaria de Córdoba a los hombres libres de América),” in La re-
forma universitaria (1918–1930), ed. Dardo Cuneo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, s.a.).
44
See, in particular, the works of Leopoldo Zea, La filosofía americana como filosofía sin
más (México: Siglo XXI, 1969), y El pensamiento latinoamericano.
45
The dependency theory had its origin in the ideas of the Argentinean economist Raúl Pre-
bisch, who developed a discourse on the deterioration of the terms of exchange between the
centre and the periphery; he coined the concept for the Latin American case of “dependent
or peripheral capitalism”.
importance of the independence movements and the creation of new, sovereign

states.46 Dependency theorists, such as the Brazilian Fernando Henrique Cardoso
(who would later become president of Brazil) and Enso Faletto,47 responded to some
of these simplistic approaches by encouraging more complex analyses that would
include the study of internal relationships among groups struggling for power at a
national level, as well as their links to the exterior, thus revealing the contradictions
inherent in national, sovereign states operating within an international economic
framework that determined them.48
The programmes for development carried out in the 1960s and 1970s in all of
Latin America led to profound changes in urban as well as rural locations (migra-
tions to the cities, incipient industrialisation, more inclusive social policies). This
new reality, which quickly generated a political and intellectual pan-continental con-
sciousness, provided fertile ground for the emergence, most noticeably in the
1990s, of modern postcolonial theories in Latin America. These theories have had
an enormous impact on anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, literature, history,
etc, giving rise to an interesting repertoire of categories for the analysis and critical
evaluation of Latin American reality. In general terms, these theories criticise the
fact that the mutual dependence between modernity and colonialism has been
ignored, with colonialism being portrayed merely as an undesired by-product of
modernity, or as a historical phase of modernity whose time has passed. Postcolo-
nial theory is unambiguous in denouncing the “epistemic violence” of Eurocentrism,
which created devices that would guarantee its expansion: the coloniality of power,
the coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of being.49
Although many theorists of Latin American postcolonialism have formed interdis-
ciplinary networks that operate like veritable think tanks, for analytical purposes we
would like to focus on some of their main areas of reflection. In the field of philoso-
phy, one of the discourses that has had the greatest impact is that of the Argentinean
thinker exiled in Mexico, Enrique Dussel, whose thesis can be summarised by the
idea that while the philosophy of the “centre” becomes an instrument of oppression
and an expression of European intellectual colonialism, at the periphery it actually
becomes an instrument of liberation.50 Another important area in the development of
46
The translation of Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein’s, The Colonial Heritage of Latin
America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970) was extraordinarily popular in Latin America during these years. Another work that dealt
with the issue of dependence in its educational facet, and which was very popular as well, was
Martin Carnoy’s work, La educación como imperialismo cultural (México: Siglo XXI, 1977).
47
See, among others, Fernando H. Cardoso, Estado y sociedad en América Latina (Buenos
Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1972); Enso Faletto, El problema de la dependencia y lo
nacional-popular (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO, 1976); Fernando H. Cardoso and Enso
Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (México: Siglo XXI, 1969).
48
As a result of this, beginning in the 1980s there was a proliferation of investigations con-
cerning the national state in Latin America. See, among others, Marcelo Carmagnani, Estado
y sociedad en América Latina, 1850–1930 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1984); Marcos Kaplan,
Aspectos del Estado en América Latina (México: UNAM, 1981); Norbert Lechner, ed., Esta-
do y política en América Latina (México: Siglo XXI, 1983); Oscar Oszlak, “The Historical
Formation of the State in Latin America. Some Theoretical and Methodological Guidelines
for its Study,” Latin American Research Review XVI-2 (1981): 3–32.
49
Libardo Tristancho Calderón, “La violencia epistémica y sus dispositivos eurocéntricos:
una mirada desde la teoría de la decolonización,” Temas de historia inmediata (La Paz,
Bolivia: Centro de Estudios para la América Andina y Amazónica), 4 (2008): 10–6.
50
Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1985).
postcolonial theory emerged in the 1990s with the critique of Latin American
“cultural studies” in numerous universities of the United States, where many of the
professors were intellectuals from Latin America. A prominent representative of this
tendency was the Argentinean Walter Mignolo, who in 1995 published The Darker
Side of the Renaissance,51 in which he proposes the thesis that the European Renais-
sance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had another invisible, forgotten side:
the colonisation of America. Certain Latin American postcolonial theorists were also
associated with the World-system approach developed by the North American sociol-
ogist Immanuel Wallerstein, with its emphasis on the mechanisms of economic distri-
bution among central, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries.52
Another fertile area of study, especially in the Andean region, is that of “inter-
culturality”, which criticises not only the imposed subjugation to the logic and reason
of Eurocentricity, but also the creation of a racial imaginary, with the consequences
that this would have for the definition of European superiority.53 From a political per-
spective, the category of interculturality encourages the struggle among different
indigenous sectors – as well as those of African descent – but not with the objective
of their integration into the modern national project. Rather, these diverse sectors are
encouraged to become a kind of “nation” among many others, with their own ways
of producing knowledge, of administering economy and justice, of relating to their
environment, etc. In other words, interculturality does not aim so much to “recog-
nise” the indigenous as another element in the multicultural diversity of the nation (a
concept found within Eurocentric universalism) but rather aspires, as a political pro-
ject articulated from the colonial difference, to a pluri-nationality.54 This debate has
led to the definition of what has been termed the “postcolonial national state” and
has produced an intense discussion about citizenship and exclusion, issues which
invariably touch on the category of ethnicity. This new phenomenon has spilled over
into the political space once occupied by the classic analyses that used the Marxist
category of social class, turning in its place to analyses in terms of identity.55
Another perspective of Latin American postcolonial theory that is worth men-
tioning is that of the Colombian Arturo Escobar, who has defended the argument
that the “Third World” does not actually exist as an objective reality, but rather as
an area for intervention created on the basis of the geopolitics of power, and upon
which certain governmental technologies are applied. According to Escobar, the
“Third World” was “invented” after the Second World War, in the contexts of the
Cold War and North American interests in Latin America and in the recently eman-
cipated nations of Africa and Asia.56
51
Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Coloni-
zation (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1995).
52
A compilation of the principal authors and approaches to this aspect of postcolonialism
can be found in Edgardo Lander, ed., La colonialidad del saber. Eurocentrismo y ciencias
sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2000).
53
Libardo Tristancho Calderón, “La Violencia Epistémica,” 10–16.
54
Catherine Walsh, Interculturalidad, Estado, Sociedad. Luchas (de)coloniales de nuestra
época (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar/Abya-Yala Editores, 2009).
55
José Antonio Figueroa, “Etnización de la política: una lectura desde la teoría crítica,” in
Etnicidad y poder en los países andinos, ed. Christian Büschges, Guillermo Bustos, and Olaf
Kaltmeier (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2007), 43–59.
56
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Before finishing this section we feel compelled to mention the association that
these postcolonial theories had with liberation theology, the movement in which cer-
tain Catholic groups stood up firmly in favour of the most underprivileged sectors of
society in Latin America. In the area of education this movement led to a clamour in
favour of “education as a practice of liberty”, a powerful slogan that came from Paulo
Freire’s first book, published in 1965. This book enjoyed unprecedented international
success, symbolising like no other the unfinished process of emancipation in Latin
America.
Postcolonial studies in Iberian and Latin American history of education: state

of art, critical reviews and research agenda
Educational historiography has shown an increasing interest in the postcolonial
approach, as seen in the numerous monographic issues that the journals
Paedagogica Historica and History of Education have dedicated to the issues of
transnationality and postcolonialism in education. The starting point was the cele-
bration in 1993 of the 15th International Standing Conference for the History of
Education in Lisbon, with the revealing heading “Education Encounters People and
Cultures: The Colonial Experience (16th–20th Centuries)”. The fact that the word
“encounters” appeared in the title suggested a desire to carry out “a broader analysis
of a theme that, for a long time, was only analysed through the lens of the influence
of the colonisers on colonised peoples and cultures”.57 At this conference António
Nóvoa introduced the concept of postcolonialism in the realm of the history of edu-
cation.58 The last 10 years have seen the publication of monographic issues and
specific articles in which the postcolonial point of view is increasingly evident,59
while there is a noticeable interest in adopting a transnational approach in choosing
57
António Nóvoa, “Endnote. Empires Overseas and Empires at Home,” 817.
58
António Nóvoa, “On History, History of Education and History of Colonial Education,” in
The Colonial Experience in Education: Historical Issues and Perspectives, eds. António
Nóvoa, Marc Depaepe, and Erwin V. Johanningmeier, vol. I of Paedagogica Historica Sup-
plementary Series (Ghent: CHSP, 1995), 23–61.
59
See, for example, Geoffrey Sherington and Craig Campbell, eds., “Education and Eth-
nicity,” special issue, Paedagogica Historica 37, no. 1 (2001); Gary McCulloch and
Roy Lowe, eds., “Centre and Periphery – Networks, Space and Geography in the His-
tory of Education,” special issue, History of Education 32, no. 5 (2003): 457–9; Ana
Isabel Madeira, “Portuguese, French and British Discourses on Colonial Education:
Church-State Relations, School Expansion and Missionary Competition in Africa, 1890–
1930,” Paedagogica Historica 41, nos. 1 and 2 (2005): 31–60; Joyce Goodman, Gary
McCulloch, and William Richardson, eds., “‘Empires overseas’ and ‘empires at home’:
postcolonial and transnational perspectives on social change in the history of education,”
special issue, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009); Tim Allender, “Understanding
education and India: new turns in postcolonial scholarship,” History of Education 39,
no. 2 (2010): 281–8; and Pascal Barthélémy, Emmanuelle Picard, and Rebecca Rogers,
eds., “L’enseignement dans l’Empire colonial français (XIXe–XXe siècles),” special issue,
Histoire de l’Éducation 128 (2010).
themes and in carrying out historiographic analysis.60 The concept of educational

transfer,61 meanwhile, has been elaborated and developed in an attempt to explore
the possibilities offered by adopting a world history or global history of
education.62
A recent work on postcolonial and transnational perspectives in the history of
education reflects some of the new historiographic approaches to the subject. These
look beyond the traditional colonial interpretative model, which always moves in a
unidirectional manner from the centre to the periphery, and incorporates a more
flexible analysis in which the concept of reciprocity allows us to discover reciprocal
and multidirectional influences between the metropolis and the colonies. This in-
depth and thoroughly documented essay on the categories of analysis used in post-
colonial studies is based almost exclusively on the case of the British Empire,
which happens to be the symbolic space which has generated the most literature on
the subject.63
We may complete this overview with contributions from other scientific commu-
nities. Educational historiography in the Iberian Peninsula, home to the Spanish and
Portuguese metropolis, can be approached from three perspectives. The first per-
spective would be a thematic one, namely, an analysis of the themes of investiga-
tion undertaken in the last 20 years and their possible consideration as postcolonial
studies. A rather superficial analysis of the two most prominent Spanish publica-
tions coming out of the V Centenary of the Discovery of the Americas – the min-
utes of the National Colloquium of the History of Education (1988) and the
monographic issue of the journal Historia de la Educación (1992) – provide us
with our first clue: in both cases they are the volumes with the fewest number of
60
See, for example, Lynne Trethewey and Kay Whitehead, “Beyond Centre and Periphery:
Transnationalism in Two Teacher/Suffragettes’ Work,” History of Education 32, no. 5
(2003): 547–59; Kevin J. Brehony, “A New Education for a New Era: Creating International
Fellowship through Conferences 1921–1938,” Paedagogica Historica 40, nos. 5 and 6
(2004): 733–55; Craig Campbell, Geoffrey Sherington, and Margaret White, “Borders and
Boundaries in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 1 (2007): 1–6; Eck-
hardt Fuchs, “Networks and the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 2
(2007): 185–97; Marcelo Caruso, “Disruptive Dynamics: The Spatial Dimensions of the
Spanish Networks in the Spread of Monitorial Schooling (1815–1825),” Paedagogica Histo-
rica 43, no. 2 (2007): 271–82; Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer, “Travelling across
National, Paradigmatic and Archival Divides: New Work for the Historian of Education,”
History of Education 38, no. 6 (2009): 721–7; and María del Mar del Pozo Andrés, “The
Transnational and National Dimensions of Pedagogical Ideas: The Case of the Project
Method, 1918–1939,” Paedagogica Historica 45, nos. 4 and 5 (2009): 561–84.
61
See, for example, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, “Transferring Education, Displacing Reforms,” in
Discourse Formation in Comparative Education, ed. Jürgen Schriewer (Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 2000), 155–87.
62
See, for example, Jürgen Schriewer, “Sistema mundial y redes de interrelación: La interna-
cionalización de la educación y el papel de la investigación comparada,” in Globalización y
descentralización de los sistemas educativos. Fundamentos para un nuevo programa de la
educación comparada, eds. Miguel A. Pereyra, Jesús García Mínguez, Miguel Beas, and
Antonio J. Gómez (Barcelona: Pomares-Corredor, 1996), 17–58; Kevin Myers, Ian Grosv-
enor, and Ruth Watts, “Education and Globalisation,” History of Education 37, no. 6 (2008):
737–41 and Marcelo Caruso, “World Systems, World Society, World Polity: Theoretical
Insights for a Global History of Education,” History of Education 37, no. 6 (2008): 825–40.
63
Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch, and William Richardson, “‘Empires Overseas’ and
‘Empires at Home’: Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives on Social Change in the
History of Education,” 695–706.
pages in their respective collections. The 50 papers given at the Colloquium were
divided – at about 50% – between the colonial era and the era of “independence”:
numerous papers were focused on Spanish pedagogues and their “influence” in
Latin America; others dealt exclusively with Spain and only two included in their
title the concept of “mutual relations”, even though this was the theme of the con-
ference.64 On the other hand, in the opening words that served as a presentation of
the monographic issue on the “History of Ibero-American Education” a call was
made to study the history of Latin American education “parallel to” Spanish and
European education and to try to “imagine a view of Spanish education as seen
from the other shore”, all of which sounded like a novel approach, a “history under
construction”.65 Yet only one of the articles included in that issue attempted to pres-
ent a “parallel” history of Spanish and American educative histories as being con-
nected somehow.66
In the following two decades, three main lines of investigation developed in Spain.
The early 1990s saw the emergence of an interest in the subject of educational exile,
in particular the massive exile of Republican pedagogues and teachers who were
forced to leave Spain after the Civil War and who emigrated to practically all of the
Latin American countries. Generally studies of the subject have focused on specific
teachers, on their Spanish trajectory (pre-Civil War), their Latin American trajectory
(post-Civil War) and especially on the institutions and projects that they started in their
countries of reception, along with the work that they carried out there.67 The second
64
V Coloquio Nacional de Historia de la Educación, Historia de las Relaciones Educativas
entre España y América (Sevilla: Departamento de Teoría e Historia de la Educación, 1988).
65
Claudio Lozano Seijas, “La educación iberoamericana. Presentación,” Historia de la Edu-
cación. Revista Interuniversitaria 11 (1992): 19.
66
Gabriela Ossenbach Sauter, “Pedro Alcántara García y las relaciones pedagógicas entre
España e Hispanoamérica a finales del siglo XIX,” Historia de la Educación. Revista Inter-
universitaria 11 (1992): 125–42.
67
See, for example, Claudio Lozano Seijas, 1939, el exilio pedagógico. Estudios sobre el
exilio republicano español de 1939 (Barcelona: PPU, 1999); Salomó Marquès Sureda and
Juan José Martín Frechilla, La labor educativa de los exiliados españoles en Venezuela
(Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 2002); Cèlia Canellas and Rosa Torán, Dolors
Piera, mestra, política i exiliada (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona y Publicacions de
l’Abadía de Montserrat, 2003); Salomó Marquès Sureda, Maestros catalanes del exilio
(México: El Colegio de Jalisco/Generalitat de Cataluña, 2003); Conrad Vilanou and Josep
Montserrat, eds., Mestres i exili. Jornades d’estudi y reflexió (Barcelona: Universitat de Bar-
celona, 2003); José Ignacio Cruz Orozco, Maestros y colegios en el exilio de 1939 (Valencia:
Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 2004); Salomó Marquès Sureda, Los hermanos Bargés
Barba. Maestros renovadores en Cataluña y México (Zapopán: El Colegio de Jalisco, 2004);
José Ignacio Cruz Orozco, ed., Los colegios del exilio en México (Madrid: Residencia de
Estudiantes, 2005); Herminio Almendros, Diario de un maestro exiliado, Amparo Blat y
Carme Doménech, eds., (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2005) and Salomó Marquès Sureda, Els mes-
tres i l’exili del 39 (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, 2005). Further reading can be
found in the article on Alicia Civera, “Exile as a means for the meeting and construction of
pedagogies: The exiled Spanish Republican teachers in Mexico in 1939”, included in this
same special issue.
line of investigation concerns the indianos schools68 and tends to be very specific
studies of the hundreds of schools created in the northern regions of Spain – princi-
pally in Galicia, Asturias and La Rioja – by Spaniards who emigrated to Latin Amer-
ica at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth century and,
after striking it rich there, spent part of their money on building and financing schools
in their towns of origin. A third line of investigation is focused on the idea of America
as it is presented in school textbooks, and is closely associated with the commemora-
tion of the 200th anniversary of the emancipation of the American nations.69
A second perspective for the analysis of the educational historiography in the
Iberian Peninsula is that of examining the investigative approaches used, in order to
discern how they conform to the discourses of postcolonial theory. There is a per-
ceptible evolution of concepts which attempt to go beyond the idea of the “influ-
ence” of the metropolis on the colonies, an influence which in the case of Spain
was inseparable from the image of the Madre Patria that is so much a part of the
collective subconscious. Yet many of the studies of the exiles continue to adopt a
metropolitan perspective; they provide a context and background for the exile’s tra-
jectory previous to the war but they are not familiar with the circumstances of the
countries that have taken them in; they analyse the way in which the exiles trans-
ferred and applied their pedagogical knowledge in their new professional surround-
ings, but they do not take into account the way in which that knowledge interacted
with and was transformed by contact with the existing educational traditions. It is
for this reason that we have included in this special issue an essay on exile – by
Alicia Civera – which provides a fresh point of view and a new perspective on the
receiving country. Investigations about the indianos schools have clearly been influ-
enced by studies of the social history of emigration, which tend to delve into the
routes of transmission, the formation of migratory networks and, above all, the con-
sequences of the emigrants’ return; the returned exiles not only brought with them
material wealth, but they served as transmitters of ideas on political and social pro-
gress which they then tried to apply in their places of origin.70 In the schools that
they built they tried to implement the public education model they had observed in
68
See, for example, Vicente Peña Saavedra, Éxodo, organización comunitaria e intervención
escolar. La impronta educativa de la emigración transoceánica en Galicia, 2 vols. (La Coru-
ña: Xunta de Galicía, 1991); Xosé M. Malheiro Gutiérrez, A escola da Bandeira. Unha nova
escola en Galicia (1909–1936) (Bandeira: Asociación Cultural Vista Alegre, 2000); Cosme
Cuenca; Mª Fernanda Fernández and Jorge Hevia, Escuelas de indianos y emigrantes en
Asturias. Rehabilitación de las escuelas de Vidiago (Gijón: Trea, 2003); Xosé M. Malheiro
Gutiérrez, Herdanza da emigración ultramarina. Catálogo fotográfico da arquitectura
escolar indiana na provincia de Pontevedra (Pontevedra: Diputación Provincial, 2005); El
Quijote en Asturias. La escuela indiana de Sama de Grado (Gijón: Asociación Cultural “La
Castañar”, 2005); Miguel Zapater Cornejo, Escuelas de Indianos en La Rioja (Logroño:
Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 2007); and Xosé M. Malheiro Gutiérrez, ed., Actas do Con-
greso Emigración e Educación (1900–1936). I Centenario das Escolas da Unión Hispano-
Americana Valle Miñor (1909–2009) (Gondomar: Instituto de Estudos Miñoranos, 2010).
69
Rafael Valls, ed., Los procesos independentistas iberoamericanos en los manuales de His-
toria, Vol. I: Países andinos y España; Vol. II: Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay; Vol.
III: Brasil e Portugal; Vol. IV: Costa Rica, México, Nicaragua y Panamá (Madrid: OEI/Fun-
dación Mapfre, 2005–2007). For the Portuguese case see M. Dores Cruz, “‘Portugal Gigan-
te’: Nationalism, Motherland and Colonial Encounters in Portuguese School Textbooks,”
Goiãnia 5, no. 2 (2007): 395–422.
70
Xosé Manuel Núñez Seijas, Emigrantes, caciques e indianos. O influxo sociopolítico da
emigración transoceánica en Galicia (1900–1930) (Vigo: Ediciones Xerais, 1998).
Argentina – a habitual destination – which was an original model that had been
elaborated and contributed to by a number of Spanish intellectuals who had spent
time in Latin America during the first decades of the twentieth century.71
A new centenary, celebrated in 2007, has brought renewed attention to the issue
of reciprocal cultural relations between centre and periphery. That year marked the
anniversary of the creation of the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios e Investigaci-
ones Científicas, an institution which between 1907 and 1936 granted thousands of
scholarships for Spanish scientists, educators and artists to travel and study abroad.
It thus generated countless transcultural experiences, many of them summed up in
the article by Miguel Somoza included in this special issue. By its very nature the
experience encouraged a historiographic production in recent years that places an
emphasis on the idea of cultural exchange, as is evidenced in publications referring
to the networks created among Spanish and Latin American intellectuals.72
The third study perspective that we wish to put forth is the analysis of the tra-
jectory of Spanish historiography of education by comparing it to that of Portugal.
Notwithstanding the many themes and interests common to both countries, there is
a clear difference between them in terms of the creation of spaces for postcolonial
investigation. Portuguese historians have constructed a common tradition with their
Brazilian colleagues, one that is based on categories such as reciprocity and mutual
production, circulation and connection. The driving force behind this historiographic
strategy was António Nóvoa, who encouraged the creation of “spaces of relation”
among three countries – Portugal, Brazil and Mozambique – and who found in
postcolonial theories inspiration for the establishment of theoretical frameworks for
future investigative agendas. Among other ideas, he recommended substituting the
traditional histories of colonisation – with their unidirectional and simplistic vision
of the coloniser–colonised relationship – with the postcolonial concept of “hybrid-
ity”, allowing for intersecting areas of contact and of encounter with the “other”.73
The early and unequivocal adoption of this investigative agenda facilitated the con-
struction of an investigative tradition74 based on the discovery of communication
networks among the three national communities. Since 1996, the tradition has been
reaffirmed in the Portuguese-Brazilian Congresses of the History of Education
(Congressos Luso-Brasileiros de História da Educaçâo), and its influence has also
71
José Manuel Malheiro Gutiérrez, “Una nueva luz. La influencia de la escuela argentina en
la intervención de los emigrantes gallegos en sus lugares de origen,” Historia de la Educa-
ción. Revista Interuniversitaria 26 (2007): 341–66.
72
Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, ed., “Monográfico. La Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios y
América Latina: memoria, políticas y acción cultural (1907–1939),” Revista de Indias 239
(2007); Rosario E. Fernández Terán and Francisco A. González Redondo, “Las cátedras de
la Institución Cultural Españolaý de Buenos Aires. Ciencia y educación entre España y
Argentina, 1910–1940,” Historia de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria 29 (2010):
195–219.
73
António Nóvoa, “Tempos da escola no espaço Portugal-Brasil-Mozambique. Dez Digres-
sões Sobre um Programa de Investigação,” in António Nóvoa and Jürgen Schriewer, eds., A
Difusão Mundial da Escola (Lisboa: Educa, 2000), 131–3; Joäo Carlos Paulo, “What Does
Indigenous Education Mean? Portuguese colonial thought and the construction of ethnicity
and education”, Paedagogica Historica 37, no. 1 (2001): 231–50.
74
See, for example, Joaquim Pintassilgo, Marcos Cezar de Freitas, Maria Joâo Mogarro, and
Marta M. Chagas de Carvalho, eds., História da escola em Portugal e no Brasil: circulação
e apropriação de modelos culturais (Lisboa: Edições Colibrí/Centro de Investigação em
Educação da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, 2006) and Marta María de
Araújo, ed., História(s) Comparada(s) da Educação (Brasilia: Liber Livro/UFRN, 2009).
begun to have an effect on comparative approaches regarding the history of educa-

tion in Brazil and other Latin American countries.75 And yet we see no evidence of
any desire or will to establish comparable “spaces of relation” between Spain and
the Latin American countries with which they shared their colonial adventure.
Situating ourselves on “the other shore”, we observe that while the investiga-
tive approaches based on postcolonial theory in Latin America have been many
and varied, their impact on the history of education is negligible. The first thing
that calls our attention is the fact that historians have given little attention to
education during the colonial era and that no significant critical discourse has
come out of it.76 This brings to mind the observation made by some historians
of the colonial era that the postcolonial paradigm should not be used to study
colonial situations in America.77
Latin American historians of education, on the other hand, have focused their atten-
tion on the national histories of the independent countries; especially in the period
when national educational systems were being put into place, ie, from the mid-
nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.78 In general these histories have paid little
attention to transnational tendencies or to the complex networks or modes of exchange
of educational models between centre and periphery or between different peripheral
regions. There are worthy exceptions to this tendency, such as the investigation of
the transatlantic book trade in the first decades of the nineteenth century by
75
Ana Chrystina Venancio Mignot and José Gonçalves Gondra, eds., Viagens Pedagógicos
(São Paulo: Cortez, 2007) and Diana Gonçálves Vidal and Adrián Ascolani, eds., Reformas
educativas no Brasil e na Argentina: ensaios de historia comparada da educação (1820–
2000) (São Paulo: Cortez, 2009).
76
A compendium of works concerning colonial education in various Latin American coun-
tries can be found in Joao Paulo G. Pimenta, “Education and the Historiography of Ibero-
american Independence: Elusive Presences, Many Absences,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no.
4 (2010): 425–6. We call special attention to the significant impact caused by the investiga-
tions on Mexican colonial education carried out by Pilar Gonzalbo, especially Historia de la
educación en la época colonial. El mundo indígena (México: El Colegio de México, 1990)
and Historia de la educación en la época colonial. La educación de los criollos y la vida
urbana (México: El Colegio de México, 1990), as well as by Dorothy Tanck in La educa-
ción ilustrada, 1786–1836. Educación primaria en la ciudad de México (México: El Colegio
de México, 1977) and Pueblos de indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750–1821
(México: El Colegio de México, 2000). Pilar Gonzalbo shows a special interest in studying
how the Mexican mestizo society was conformed and in knowing its history after the con-
quest, a history of “slow changes, silenced resistance and the material and intellectual recon-
struction of a world in ruins”. Vid. Gabriela Ossenbach, “Conversación con Pilar Gonzalbo
Aizpuru, profesora-investigadora de El Colegio de México,” Historia de la Educación.
Revista Interuniversitaria 29 (2010): 365–6.
77
Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirage,” Colo-
nial Latin American Review 1, no. 2 (1992): 3–23. Other historians, on the other hand,
affirm that the colonial reflection goes back a long way and concerns, equally, indigenous,
mestizo and formally educated thinkers since the early modern era. See Ileana Rodríguez
and Josebe Martínez, eds., Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales. II. Mito, archivo, disciplina:
cartografías culturales.
78
See Gabriela Ossenbach, “Research into the History of Education in Latin America: bal-
ance of the current situation,” Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 3 (2000), 841–66 and Marcelo
Caruso, “Abstand von ‘Zivilisation’. Supranationale Umwelt und aktuelle Entwicklungslinien
lateinamerikanischer Bildungsgeschichtsschreibung,” Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforsch-
ung 14 (2008): 323–48.
Eugenia Roldán79 and the network analysis that this author undertook, in collaboration
with Thomas Schupp, on the introduction of the monitorial system of education in
early independent Spanish America.80
Certain overly simplistic views of the history of education – possibly a conse-
quence of the dependency theory itself – have often conveyed the idea of unidirec-
tional movement in which models are always circulating from the central regions to
Latin America. Acknowledgement of the capacity for the colonised or peripheral
countries to appropriate these models, make them their own, and produce significant
changes in them can be found in the important work Mirar la infancia: pedagogía,
moral y modernidad en Colombia, 1903–1946 (A look at infancy: pedagogy, morals
and modernity in Colombia, 1903–1946)81 by J. Sáenz, O. Saldarriaga, and A.
Ospina, and in the investigations that Eugenia Roldán undertook with Marcelo Car-
uso concerning the “acclimatization” of the monitorial system of education in Latin
America.82 A different approach, one based on the history of concepts, was used by
Marcelo Caruso, who applied the term “semantic emancipation” to refer to the
transformation and weakening in post-independent America of the category, so
imbued with Spanish connotations, of primeras letras (a form of designating the
realm of elementary education).83
An emerging area of study in which postcolonial theories could be applied is
that of the education of indigenous and African descendants.84 Attention to indige-
nous education has increased significantly in recent years as a part of the history of
rural education and as a consequence of the proliferation of regional, local and pro-
vincial studies carried out above all in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. It
should be noted that there is a tendency in studies of rural education to not take
into account the specific conditions of the indigenous, including them in general as
79
Eugenia Roldán Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence. Edu-
cation and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective (Aldershot and Burling-
ton: Ashgate, 2003).
80
Eugenia Roldán Vera and Thomas Schupp, “Bridges over the Atlantic: a Network Analysis
of the Introduction of the Monitorial System of Education in Early-Independent Spanish
America”, in Nationalerziehung und Universalmethode. Frühe Formen schulorganisatori-
scher Globalisierung, ed. Jürgen Schriewer and Marcelo Caruso (Leipzig: Comparativ. Leip-
ziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, Jg. 15,
Heft 1, 2005), 58–93.
81
J. Sáenz, O. Saldarriaga, and A. Ospina, Mirar la infancia: pedagogía, moral y moderni-
dad en Colombia, 1903–1946 (Medellín: Colciencias/Eds. Foro Nacional por Colombia/Eds.
Uniandes/Ed. Universidad de Antioquia, 1997), 2 vols.
82
In particular, one should see Marcelo Caruso and Eugenia Roldán Vera, eds., “Pluralizing
Meanings: The Monitorial System of Education in Latin America in the Early Nineteenth
Century”, special issue, Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 6 (2005). The same approach can be
found in Eugenia Roldán Vera and Marcelo Caruso, eds., Imported Modernity in Post-
Colonial State Formation. The Appropriation of Political, Educational and Cultural Models
in Nineteenth-century Latin America (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007).
83
Marcelo Caruso, “La emancipación semántica: ‘primeras letras’ en Hispanoamérica (ca.
1770–1840),” Bordón 62, no. 2 (2010): 39–51.
84
See, for example, Lasse Hölck and Monika Contreras Saiz, “Educating Bárbaros: Educa-
tional Policies on the Latin American Frontiers between Colonies and Independent Republics
(Araucanía, Southern Chile/Sonora, México),” and Luciano Mendes de Faria Filho and Mar-
cus Vinicius Fonseca, “Political culture, schooling and subaltern groups in the Brazilian
Empire (1822–1850),” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 4 (2010): 435–48 and 525–39. See
also Cynthia Greive Veiga, “Escola pública para os negros e os pobres no Brasil: uma inven-
çâo imperial,” Revista Brasileira de Educacâo 13, no. 39 (2008): 502–16.
a part of the rural peasantry.85 Nonetheless, the fact that studies of rural education
are being carried out should be recognised as a gesture that is much in keeping with
the subaltern approach proposed by postcolonial theories, because the focus is
moved away from urban contexts in which the Eurocentric legacy is more likely to
have left its imprint.86 In other cases, indigenous education has been studied as a
part of the history of indigenous groups, separate from the specific field of the his-
tory of education. Such studies have provided us with the opportunity to know
some of the educative strategies designed by the indigenous themselves, “from the
bottom up”.87 Other studies, perhaps affording a greater critical potential, have
attempted to approach the perception of the indigenous through the application of
theories of “otherness”, developed by Tzvetan Todorov, among others.88
The idea that Latin America has also proved itself capable of producing changes
in its metropolis represents another approach to the postcolonial perspective on the
history of education that we are proposing in this special issue. As Pablo Pineau
has stated, “making progress in giving America the ‘right to history’ requires think-
ing that America was capable of producing deep changes in Europe and seeing both
continents in passive and active modes”.89 Proposing for Latin America an inverted
circulation in which models flowed from the periphery to the centre certainly
represents a Copernican turn, a new zone of looking,90 that stirs up the accepted
85
An historiographical overview of rural education in Latin America can be found in
“Alcances y retos de la historiografía sobre la escuela de los campos en América Latina
(siglos XIX y XX),” Cuadernos de Historia 34 (2011). See also Alicia Civera, Juan Alfon-
seca, and Carlos Escalante, eds., Campesinos y escolares. La construcción de la escuela en
el campo latinoamericano. Siglos XIX y XX (México: El Colegio Mexiquense/Miguel Angel
Porrúa Editores, 2011).
86
In some ways this shift of perspective is reminiscent of that proposed by Argentinean his-
torian Adriana Puiggrós, who defends alternative pedagogical discourses that show a resis-
tance to the “normalization” imposed by the Argentinean educational system created by
Domingo F. Sarmiento. See Adriana Puiggrós, Sujetos, disciplina y curriculum en los oríge-
nes del sistema educativo argentino, 1885–1916 (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1990).
87
Magdalena and Beatriz Cajías de la Vega, “Apuntes para repensar la educación indígena a
la luz de su historia y de los procesos de liberación del indio en Bolivia,” Historia de la
Educación 29 (2010): 103–16. See also Escalante, Carlos, “Indígenas e Historia de la Educa-
ción en América Latina (siglos XIX y XX). Un primer acercamiento biblio-hemerográfico,”
Revista de la Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación (2005): 59–86.
88
Tzvetan Todorov, La conquista de América. El problema del otro (México: Siglo XXI,
1991, 3rd ed.) and Nosotros y los otros (México: Siglo XXI, 1991). See, among others, Teresa
Artieda, “El ‘otro más otro’ o los indígenas americanos en los textos escolares. Una propuesta
de análisis,” in Manuales escolares en España, Portugal y América Latina (siglos XIX y XX),
eds. J.-L. Guereña, Gabriela Ossenbach, and María del Mar del Pozo (Madrid: UNED, 2005),
485–501; Teresa Artieda, “Los pueblos aborígenes en el currículum y en los libros de texto de
la escuela primaria durante el ‘primer peronismo’ (1946–1955),” Anuario de Historia de la
Educación 4 (2001/2002): 113–36; Ileana Ramírez and Teresa Artieda, “Relaciones entre
escuela y pueblos indígenas en Argentina. Génesis y cambios en el campo discursivo entre
finales de los siglos XIX y XX,” Historia Caribe 15 (2009): 69–84; María Andrea Nicoletti,
“Los indígenas de la Patagonia en los libros de texto de la Congregación Salesiana: la
construcción de los ‘otros’ internos (1900–1930),” Anuario de Historia de la Educación 7
(2006): 182–207; Mirta Teobaldo and María Andrea Nicoletti, “Entre centauros y santos: los
indígenas de la Patagonia en los textos escolares oficiales y las biografías de Ceferino
Namuncurá,” Historia Caribe 15 (2009): 47–67.
89
Pablo Pineau, “Education and Globalisation: A Latin American Perspective,” History of
Education 37, no. 6 (2008): 747.
90
António Nóvoa, “Endnote. Empires Overseas and Empires at Home,” 819–20.
consciousness of this continent as a region that did nothing but receive outside
influences. In 1936 Arthur Lovejoy proposed another possible line of investigation
for the history of ideas that would surely help to identify and reveal much of the
phenomena of inverted circulation of influences and models. Lovejoy proposed a
history of “unit-ideas”, ideas which upon circulating would become nuanced and, in
some cases, acquire more strength than the original idea. From this perspective,
Latin America can be seen as a continent that produced countless nuances on ideas
that arrived from the metropolis; then, in a process of refraction, these ideas circu-
lated with even greater strength back towards the centre.91
We also propose introducing the concept of “hybridity” into the academic debate
on the history of education in Latin America. This concept not only facilitates the
creation of cultural exchange and the definition of meeting places among cultures;
it also helps to better comprehend all those individuals, such as exiles and emi-
grants, who lived between two worlds and were forced to negotiate and construct a
new personal identity, one in which the colonial aspect was an important part. Luis
de Zulueta, professor of history of education, intellectual, Minister of the Second
Spanish Republic and exile in Colombia after the Civil War, stated that “truth is
essentially a mestizo creation”. This paraphrasing of Rostand was Zulueta’s way of
affirming, there at the crossroads of colonisers and colonised, his new identity,
which no longer belonged to either of these categories.92
Postcolonialism is, above all, an attitude, a way of looking at the world that
encourages reflection on the manner in which relations with the past can mark the
present and the future of national communities. The notion of “time-lag” introduced
by Bhabha suggests that “the colonial past is present and informs the postcolonial
now, that is, in the colonialist stereotype that surfaces in the present and troubles
the linearity of modernity by repeating the past”.93 Postcolonialism makes us ques-
tion our most deeply felt identities and reveals dark corners of our consciousness in
which remnants of imperial constructs persist. But it also allows us to invent new
spaces for reflection, spaces that encourage transnational communication.
Notes on contributors
Gabriela Ossenbach is full professor of contemporary history of education at the National
University of Distance Education (UNED), in Madrid. Her main research areas are the history
of educational systems and school textbooks in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. She is currently the director of the MANES Research Centre, based in the UNED,
dedicated to the study and preservation of textbooks of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America in
the last two centuries. Among her recent publications stand out the chapter “Education” in
Historia General de América Latina (General History of Latin America), (Vol. VII: 1870–
1930) published by UNESCO (2008) and the edition of the special issue of the journal
Historia de la Educación (Salamanca) on the theme “Education and empowerment processes
in Latin America. On the Bicentennial of American Independences” (2010).
91
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1936). The suitableness of Lovejoy’s theories for the history of
ideas in Latin America has been proposed by Juan Marichal, Cuatro fases de la historia
intelectual latinoamericana (1810–1970) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March/Ed. Cátedra,
1978), 19–28.
92
Luis de Zulueta, El rapto de América (Ensayo sobre la colonización española) (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1952), 101.
93
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 253.
María del Mar del Pozo is full professor of theory and history of education in the University
of Alcalá. Since 2005 she has been secretary of the Spanish Society for the History of
Education, and since 2006 she has been a member of the Executive Committee of the
International Standing Conference for the History of Education. Her main lines of research
and publications are: the role of education in the building of national identities, urban
education, teacher training, reception of international pedagogical movements in Spain,
iconography and education, women and education, ethnography of the school, and the history
of curriculum.

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International Journal of the History of Education

ISSN: 0030-9230 (Print) 1477-674X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpdh20

Postcolonial models, cultural transfers and

Gabriela Ossenbach & María del Mar del Pozo

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