Journey · 9 stops
Thinking Freedom
Thinkers who turned their own experience into philosophies of freedom – and changed what counts as rights, knowledge and education.
Stops
Stop 1 of 9: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
Around 1615 the Andean nobleman Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala completes a letter of almost 1,200 pages to the Spanish king, with nearly 400 drawings: a history of the Andes, a critique of colonial rule and a programme for good government, in Spanish, Quechua and images. He does not wait to be defended – he claims the right to describe his own world. In 1550 Las Casas had argued at Valladolid that the Indigenous peoples possess reason and legitimate rule; Guaman Poma demonstrates it.
Stop 2 of 9: Olympe de Gouges
The Revolution of 1789 declares the rights of man and citizen. Olympe de Gouges rewrites the declaration article by article for women: if woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum. She also writes against slavery. The Terror guillotines her in 1793. In England Mary Wollstonecraft argued in 1792 that women lack not reason but education; the universal had been declared and withheld at once.
Stop 3 of 9: Anna Julia Cooper
Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery in 1858, adds what neither Gouges nor Wollstonecraft could see from where they stood: that race and sex shape a life together. Black male leaders ignore women, white feminists ignore race, and the measure of a people’s progress is the position of its Black women. “A Voice from the South” (1892) is often called a founding text of Black feminism, written by a teacher of Latin who took a Sorbonne doctorate at sixty-six.
Stop 4 of 9: B. R. Ambedkar
B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Dalit family then called “untouchable”, becomes a jurist with doctorates from Columbia and London, chief architect of India’s constitution and the sharpest critic of caste: it cannot be reformed, because the scriptures sanction it; it must be annihilated. Against Gandhi, who wished to purify Hinduism, he leaves it, converting with hundreds of thousands of Dalits to a Buddhism he reads as an ethics of equality.
Stop 5 of 9: Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique in colonial Algeria, describes what colonisation does to the mind. The colonised internalise the gaze of the coloniser – “Black Skin, White Masks” – and decolonisation is not only political but the remaking of a person. His “Wretched of the Earth” (1961), with its defence of violence, became one of the most debated texts of the anti-colonial struggle; Steve Biko took its psychology into apartheid South Africa.
Stop 6 of 9: Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire, teaching literacy to Brazilian peasants, draws the pedagogical consequence. “Banking” education deposits knowledge in passive students and reproduces oppression; in dialogue the oppressed learn to read the word and the world and become subjects of their own history. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1968) drew on Hegel, Marx and Fanon and was taken up by bell hooks as “education as the practice of freedom”.
Stop 7 of 9: Angela Davis
Angela Davis thinks from inside the American prison, where she spent sixteen months in 1970–72. Trained by Marcuse and Adorno, she argues that race, class and gender form one system of domination, and that prisons do not solve social problems but make them – and the people deemed surplus – disappear. Abolition means building the institutions that would make prisons unnecessary. Her analysis prepared what Patricia Hill Collins would call the matrix of domination.
Stop 8 of 9: Vine Deloria Jr.
Vine Deloria Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux scholar, questions the frame itself. Native religions, he argues in “God Is Red”, are bound to sacred places; Western religions and philosophies are organised around time, history and progress – and have used that story to justify taking the land. In his account, Native thought is not a footnote on the Western map but a map of its own; Viola Cordova would later develop a Native American metaphysics in the same spirit.
Stop 9 of 9: María Lugones
María Lugones brings the stations together. Colonialism, she argues with Quijano and Oyěwùmí, imposed not only a racial order but a binary gender system – the “coloniality of gender” – so that the oppression of colonised women cannot be understood by adding race to sex. Against it she proposes “world”-travelling: learning to perceive from within the worlds of others. The journey ends with a philosophy confident enough to question even its own categories.
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