Visceral Literacies, Political Intensities: Affect as Critical Potential in Literacy Research and Practice

• In Event: The Affective Turn in Literacy Research: Theories, Potentials, Difference

Abstract

Can you smell the beloved uncle’s absent Christmas tamales? Are your ears still ringing from that siren’s scream? What is the taste, the smell, the sound of violent immigration policy? Leslie’s story of her uncle’s deportation is sensational, in the true meaning of that word. It is full up with the senses, steeped in the intensity of affect. In this paper, the author immerses in two children’s narrations of the political as/of their lives in a 2nd grade literacy classroom to explore the critical potential of the affective in literacy research and practice. Drawing particularly on the ideas of intensity, as a not-yet-named space of sensation (Massumi, 2002) and bodily horizons (Ahmed, 2010), I explore the potential of affect to un-name categories, to un-know well-worn tales that reiterate what we/I already think we know—about culpability, advocacy, longing, loss, connection, distance, and how the political permeates classrooms. Whether it is the first or one-hundredth time of experiencing Leslie’s story of deportation or Rolanda’s of incarceration, response exists first in sensation, in the realm of intensity. The uncle’s big smile, the one she misses so much, I feel it warm the room. But then, blink, and the language are right there, before we can stop them, filing sensation into its clearly labeled folders, mapping bodies onto pre-figured, consequential, story lines. “Candidates Clash Over Immigration Policy” Try not to lose the warmth of the smile, the earthy smell of the cornhusks. What does affect do in literacy classrooms in relation to particular bodies and the stories they tell and that are told about them? How might we think about affect and its critical potential to make more tangibly available the uncapturable, the visceral literacies that offer a felt sense of the stakes of the political in stories shared and witnessed? I examine how shifting the critical body (of literacy scholarship, of literacy teachers-researchers, of children) into the affective can shake up what is possible to see more clearly and muddle more deeply in the highly consequential racialized, classed, gendered, and heterosexist narratives of what and who is valued, seen, counted, in literacy policies and practices.

Author

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado Boulder