Affective Impasses: The Art of Refusing to Be Included in English Literature Class

• In Event: "Inhuman" Literacies: Beyond a Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion in Education

Abstract

Objectives
Recent turns in affect theories address the messiness of identity and representation. While affect theory is critiqued for neglecting to account for race and for a refusal to engage with issues of oppression, more recent scholarship attends to how ‘affecting subjectivities’ considers politics as processes of circulation and assemblage, rather than starting with an autonomous subject (Ali, Lui, Ashley, Nishida, Liebert, & Billies, 2017). This paper takes up the ‘inhuman’ and ‘affecting subjectivities’ in relation to an in-school study in a secondary English classroom.

Theoretical Framework/Methodology

This paper draws from new materialist theories (Snaza, Sonu, Truman & Zaliwska, 2016), affect studies (Ahmed, 2004) and critical posthumanism (Wynter, 2003) to investigate the affective forces and more-than-human agency in pedagogy and literacy practices. Mishra Tarc (2013) argues that although the material effects and discursive construction of race can be examined empirically, the affective and psychosocial effects of race on both individuals and groups remain both “intangible and persistent” (p. 370). In this paper, I focus on an encounter between a Muslim student, her writing practice, the fast of Ramadan, and her ‘refusal’ to complete a particular task as an affective force (Simpson, 2007; Ahmed, 2004). Rather than read the encounter phenomenologically, which would attend to how this student experienced classroom spaces and in-school assignments, I examine the student’s writing encounters and her poetry as frictional and productive ‘affecting subjectivities.’

Methods

Methods included walking, reading, and writing with the student within the school and in public spaces. Data sources include student observations of fasting, writings (poetry, speculative fiction, maps) and itinerant interviews with the students.

Significance

Despite ‘multi-cultural’ approaches to teaching and learnings, Snaza and Sonu (2016) argue, the “organization of classrooms and the behavioral habits expected (and enforced!) in them are not neutral with respect to class or race” (pp. 34-35). Highlighting how affect operates across and between bodies, my paper takes up the affects/effects of walking, language use, and other forms of trans-personal interaction with this particular student understanding that in a relational ontology we are all implicated. Significantly, the paper shows how discomfort/refusal can operate as affective and productive forces in education and subvert dominant uses of writing and education practices that operate through rhetoric of rehabilitation and inclusion of ‘inhuman’ others.

Author

• Sarah E. Truman, Manchester Metropolitan University (ESRI)