Abstract

HERNANDEZ ZAMORA, Gregorio. From New Literacy Studies to Decolonial Perspectives in Literacy Research. Íkala [online]. 2019, vol.24, n.2, pp.363-386. ISSN 0123-3432.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v24n01a10.

Relying upon an extensive literature review, this article traces the history of the New Literacy Studies (NLS), from their origins in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s to the decolonial turn that is emerging in Latin America these days. It is argued that the NLSs were not a purely academic project in their beginnings, but political criticism closely related to the current postcolonial or decolonial thought, questioning the policies and discourses that neglect or downplay cultural practices by non-dominant groups in society and, at the same time, reclaiming their knowledge, voices, identities and practices. It also argues that literate education in Latin American countries must be a project of educating agents with the voice, the capacity and the willingness to think and speak for themselves in the public space. To reconstruct this history and ground this argument, the article reviews three major movements behind decolonial thinking: the intellectual movement of the NLS; the historical movements of resistance and liberation against colonialism and neocolonialism in Latin America; and the intellectual movement self-named postcoloniality or decoloniality, built in recent decades by scholars in Europe, North America and Latin America.

Keywords : postcolonialism; decolonialism; new literacy studies; educational research; literacy.

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