ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about hope, written with all the detachment that rage can afford and with the purpose of challenging social and educational policies and practices manufactured in the era of cynical reason. It addresses the issues surrounding the construction of ethnoracial identity, in particular the invention of whiteness. The book discusses the work of critical multiculturalists in attempting to unsettle both conservative assaults on multiculturalism and liberal paradigms of multiculturalism; the latter, simply repackage conservative and neoliberal ideologies under a discursive mantle of diversity. Revolutionary multiculturalism as a point of intersection with critical pedagogy supports the struggle for a postcolonial hybridity. Critical pedagogy attempts to reengage a social world that operates under the assumption of its collective autonomy and so remains resistant to human intervention.
