A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP
Practice Module on This File
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created August 11 2002
Latest Update: August 11, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Galeano's Stories: The Site of Embraces
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.The Site of Embraces Site devoted to Eduardo Galeano. This is an example of the creation of an audience for the completion of a performative act. Eduardo Galeano tells the stories, and college students capture with those stories a part of history they might never have known, and can now take those stories into their reconstruction of their world and their own lived experience.
One of the transformations is an expression of gratitude for the privileges and opportunities for freedom and self-realization they now realize have been afforded them in a world where such freedom is rare. These were college freshman. Many of you who frequent this site are older than that. I hope that you will see Maria Pia Lara's theory in a somewhat different light. I hope that instead of just being grateful for your advantages, these stories will inspire you to conceive of the Other, not as someone you are thankfully better off than, but, even more importantly, as someone whose stories may offer a new beginninig for understanding our world, the collective world, with a different perspective, a different voice.
Perhaps. instead of teaching our mouse children that the cat is violent and dangerous, we will learn to speak a little of the cat's language and bark at it, thus beginning to balance the power relationship and to see each other anew. The cat is better off than the mice, insofar as military might is concerned. Yet mother mouse, sees cat language as a tool to enhance her own power, and turns that around into a positive moral lesson: learn foreign languages. See The Barking Mouse on the Tolerance.org site.