ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights that post-colonial models of architectural pedagogy are not only possible but necessary. The post-colonial is defined not as the infrastructures of violence, improvisation, and excess in former colonial territories, but as what happens when the regimes of death and cruelty that ruled over plantations in the Caribbean spill on the rest of the world like organic matter. The pedagogical model proposed learns from the radical practice of education in the tobacco factories of the Caribbean where workers, who were denied any means of formal education, would choose one of their own who knew how to read, to read for them during the entire workday. As these loudreaders shared anti-capitalist and anti-colonial texts, a rebellious imagination spread like wildfire across factories in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. Starting at the beginning of the global pandemic of COVID-19, and reflecting on the demands for anti-racist justice of Black Lives Matter, the model of loudreaders fosters networks of solidarity challenging further alienation by reclaiming available platforms of mass digital communication. Loudreaders offers an alternative model of education that simultaneously decenters Eurocentric pedagogies and epistemologies, while fostering discourses and practices at the intersection of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, transfeminism, and other forms of human emancipation.
