Countering the pedagogy of cruelty with love from/for the South(s)

This paper presents a counter account in the form of a letter written by a mother to her two sons, following a racist attack against one of them. The letter mobilizes memories and systems of knowledge from the South(s) — specifically from South America and West Africa — two geographies that coexist in the first author’s everyday life. In doing so, it offers a counter-pedagogy of cruelty, a concept developed by feminist decolonial anthropologist Rita Segato, who describes the pedagogy of cruelty as a systemic pedagogy that teaches individuals to objectify others, erase empathy, and normalize disposability. The letter interlaces lullabies, ancestral knowledge, spiritual traditions, and embodied experiences to resist the dehumanizing language of accounting, and instead center love, memory, and relationality. This paper contributes to the feminist counter-accounting agenda by advancing counter accounts as counter-pedagogies of cruelty. These accounts are grounded in: (1) love, understood as a form of resistance; (2) non-duality, which embraces complexity, messiness, and the coexistence of diverse epistemologies; and (3) alternative forms of writing and knowledge-making that challenge the epistemic oppression embedded in dominant academic norms.