ABSTRACT

The decade of the 1980s set the stage for the reappropriation of the "common culture", leading Patrick Buchanan to urge his fellow conservatives "to wage a cultural revolution in the nineties as sweeping as the political revolution of the eighties". This cultural revolution is indeed moving forward with rapid speed, from the onslaught on cultural diversity and multicultural education to Patrick Buchanan's call to our national and patriotic sense to build a large wall along the Mexican border to keep Mexicans from their own land. This chapter presents a series of dialogues that the author has had with Paulo Freire over the years concerning the role of culture, class, gender, and language in the development of a new anticolonial society rooted in the dynamics of cultural production. Culture involves power and helps to produce asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realize their needs.