4 Robert K. Beshara
sustainability (one of the four college-wide student learning outcomes at
Northern), I find Native American Postcolonial Psychology (Duran &
Duran 1995) and Writings for a Liberation Psychology (Martín-Baró,
1996) to be valuable pedagogic resources for teaching psychology
critically, or from the borders.
Introduction to Psychology is such an important course because it is a
general education requirement, for undergraduate students, in most
colleges and universities in the United States, so I feel a moral obligation
(along with my fellow scholars) to think critically about the content of this
course, as both a teacher and a researcher. The inspiration behind this book
came to me while teaching Introduction to Psychology over the last five
years, first at the University of West Georgia and then at Northern New
Mexico College.
While teaching, I noticed at least two things: (1) the course is called
Introduction to Psychology and not Introduction to Mainstream (Euro-
American) Psychology and (2) many of my minority (e.g., African
American, Hispanic, and Native American) students did not feel
represented by the introductory psychology textbook because of obvious
differences in terms of class, ‘race’/ethnicity, sex, and/or culture, which
gave them the impression that the typical psychologist is bourgeois,
‘White’, male, and Euro-American. To correct this (mis)representation,
along the lines of what Sara Ahmed (2013) calls “the politics of citation,” I
believe that we, critical psychologists, have a responsibility to put forth a
global, inclusive (i.e., North-South) vision of psychology and to do this by
citing Southern Theorists, psychologists or otherwise, particularly from the
margins (i.e., proletariat, non-‘White’, female, and indigenous/African/
Asian/Latinx). In other words, the question of a global, or “pluriversal”
(Mignolo 2008), psychology is not to be dismissed, but the ‘dirty work’ of
critique must take place first. This was my challenge to the contributors,
and it is also an active challenge to the reader.
To fulfill this ambitious aim of marking the coordinates of a global, or
pluriversal, psychology, I invited fourteen critical psychologists to
contribute chapters according to the following “delinking” (Mignolo 2007)
logic: (1) critiquing and decolonizing the typical chapters that