History teaching and textbook in the geopolitics of knowledge in Timor-Leste

Abstract

In the second half of the 20th century, Timor-Leste experienced two successive eras of foreign domination. Through the school apparatus, Portuguese colonialism and the Indonesian occupation imposed their own narratives and worldviews on the territory, subordinating Timorese knowledge and stories. This article problematizes the teaching of history in independent Timor-Leste, focusing on issues around the new textbook of history and the dilemmas involved in the curricular restructuring of an educational system that coexists with legacies of colonial and epistemic violence. Considering the strategic character of history teaching in nation building and education of its citizens, the textbook will be treated as a pedagogical technology that authorizes certain discourses and disallows others, fixing them in printed texts whose effects and conditions of production will be under study. After discussing the elaboration and implementation of the textbook in the context of Portuguese-speaking international cooperation, a circumscribed examination of its content is proposed, locating Timor-Leste in the narrative structure of global history and exploring the perspectives adopted on the main subjects of this history. Supported by specialized literature and fieldwork, the article offers an ethnography of the reception of these materials, in order to demonstrate how the teaching of history in the country is also the result of a geopolitics of knowledge located at multiple scales, in which the coloniality of external institutions, which intervene in national educational agendas, have to negotiate with local practices that appropriate and adulterate the stories that arrive there.