Peripheral Centrality: The Case of the Brazilian Paulo Freire.

How does a peripheral intellectual become world-renowned? Considering the asymmetries of the transnational circulation of ideas, the success of some peripheral intellectuals in the global north is surprising, for example, the world-known Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. He belonged to the first generation of those persecuted by the Brazilian military regime and went into exile in Chile in 1964. There, he worked with Christian Democracy at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization for five years. In 1969, he spent a year as a visiting professor at Harvard, living in Cambridge, attending the Center for the Study of Economic Growth and on weekends attending informal invitations from groups of educators interested in his work. Although his work had not yet been translated into English, there were reports about it in the North American press. The following year, he moved to Geneva to become a consultant for the World Council of Churches and throughout the 1970s, he worked as an international consultant in former Portuguese colonies in Africa (especially Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique). This work reconstructs the objective conditions of his career that favored his worldwide recognition. Analyses of the influences that intellectuals from the global “north” have had on the “south” have been very common. This work proposes an inversion of the vector, analyzing the conditions of circulation, reception and consecration of an intellectual from the South in the global North.