UMass Boston Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics Panayota Gounari gave a great talk on Critical Race Theory and historical revisionism in US schools at the 7th seminar series Politics of Liberation on December 7th, 2022.

“Far-right populist authoritarianism builds on the rhetoric of historical revisionism. Revisionist history can be illustrated in the U.S. Republicans’ backlash against using Critical Race Theory in school curricula, promoting at the same time ‘Patriotic Education,’ a whitewashed nativist version that bears little relevance to the present, while selectively erasing the past. This seminar explores the features and politics of historical narratives, collective remembering and their role in supporting and strengthening the authoritarian far-right Trumpist rhetoric. The control over the collective historical narrative is central in far-right politics, and Trumpism has successfully integrated a dangerous historical revisionism into its muddy ideological mix. The distortion of history has traditionally been at the core of all ideological struggles. Features of far-right authoritarian narratives will be presented in an attempt to frame history as a critical pedagogical project and pedagogy as a historical project. Different themes will be weaved under the light of history and the process of historicization, situating social phenomena and events in their historical dimension.”