Internationalization of Higher Education for Development
Authors: Ress Susanne , Epstein Irving , Carney Stephen , Madsen Ulla Ambrosius 
Published: July 2019

Illuminating thus far understudied international relations in global higher education, the book titled Internationalization of Higher Education for Development illustrates how the Brazilian government, under the presidency of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), legitimized Africa-Brazil relations often referring to the presumably shared history of transatlantic slavery as the condition for solidarity cooperation and international integration. Ress reveals how this notion of history produces a vision of Brazil as a multicultural nation able to redress longstanding racialized inequalities while casting ‘Africa’ as the continent that remains forever in the past. She explores how this ambiguous notion was translated into curricula and classroom practices, and, in particular how it shaped international students’ experiences at a newly-created university in the Northeast of Brazil. Ress demonstrates how the historicized framing in conjunction with the powerfully racialized class structures that characterize Brazilian society, the challenging material conditions surrounding the university, and the future aspirations of students created an environment that made solidarity an economic necessity while repeating the century-old colonial gesture of othering ‘Africa’ in new yet all too familiar ways – reworking and reemploying the idea of race in the name of Brazil’s progress and development.

This book showcases in an innovative way the challenges and opportunities of building international relations in postcolonial education contexts. A much-needed advances over current scholarship analysing race, blackness, and solidarity, it offers a timely contribution to postfoundational and postcolonial studies in comparative and international education.

The University of International Integration of African-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB) provides an interesting case study for the implementation of higher education within a South-South development paradigm, which seeks to strengthen Africa-Brazil relations and Brazil’s position as a global player while addressing racial disparity in Brazilian higher education and underdevelopment in the rural interior. Envisioned as a project of South-South solidarity, extensive fieldwork revealed a much more ambiguous set of relations. With its over-privileging of an abolitionist narrative, UNILAB fails to acknowledge the significance of Portuguese colonialism as well as anti-colonial independence movements in configuring a shared Lusophone history, while disavowing the diversity of experiences of international students. International professors and students sometimes expressed discomfort with being made to represent a Brazil-centered understanding of history. They are worried that affirmative action policies would compromise South-South cooperation. Although the university’s core humanistic curriculum followed a postcolonial, non-Eurocentric logic, classroom observations often revealed Brazil-centered emancipation narratives that posited Africa as a simplified other, racializing Africa and international students in the name of Brazilian progress. Rather than taking race for granted, this study unpacks the concepts as an object of knowledge by drawing upon insights from critical black studies. The study observes when, where, and how the idea of race emerges, and what functions it performs as a conceptual and political category while problematizing the Enlightenment binary of reason and unreason inscribed into human flesh through colonial technologies of dehumanization and expropriation. Calling for a conscious yet non-essentializing conceptualization of race in education research and theory, the study moves beyond race as marker of difference as either cultural or biological classification by showing multiple meanings it takes on as a frame of reference for students and professors to make sense of the university, as a political technology, and as a subject position that defies singular interpretations as it travels across times and spaces with international student mobility offering yet another moment of reinterpretation.