In this critical inquiry, I look at how individuals who experience social, cultural and economic exclusion in postcolonial societies construct cultural identities and relationships with what they perceive as the dominant cultures of their countries through the process of schooling. Here, the term 'postcolonial' refers to events, places, and conditions that are situated after periods of colonization, and implicate individuals whose histories are linked to colonizers and colonized peoples. / This thesis discusses theoretical, political, philosophical and methodological issues around the design, implementation, interpretation and report of an ethnographic inquiry carried out in Brazil (Sao Paulo area) and southern France in 2004-2005. In this project, I organized focus groups of adolescents from marginalized communities in those two locations with the intention to generate critical dialogues about their experience of schooling and the dynamics between what they perceived as their cultural identity, their school's culture, and the culture of their countries. More than a mere survey of the accommodation and representation of 'minority' histories and peoples in France and Brazil, this study strives to explore and compare how the societal apparatuses of those two countries, with a particular emphasis on schooling, produce categories of cultural difference and inscribe them onto societal subjects. Thus, I carried out my inquiry with the belief that schooling is not simply a site of cultural transmission and reproduction, but also of cultural and identity production: a matrix that recreates, renegotiates, and institutionalizes hierarchical boundaries of difference that become actualized in students' subjectivities (Hall, 1999).

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