Affective Borders and the Reconstruction of Whiteness

• In Event: 43.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 43.077-4 - Woven out of a Thousand Details: Approaching Affective, Racial, and Sociopolitical Boundaries in Educational Research

Abstract

This paper offers white longing as a theoretical intervention to reconstructionist imaginings of a reflexive and melancholic whiteness. White longing recognizes whiteness as the inverse lived experience of historicized loss, and thus posits that scholars’ suggestions that negative affective experiences of whiteness (like shame) might be framed as white double consciousness (Alcoff, 2015; Martinot, 2014; Yancy, 2016), white double image (Seidl & Hancock, 2011), white melancholia (Hubinette & Lundstrom, 2011), or white racial dualism (Winant, 2004), are variations on a theme that misunderstand and misrecognize the affective impulse being felt by whites. Informed by Ahmed’s (2013) analysis of emotions as “impressions” that can both construct and deconstruct borders, white longing seeks to name a liminal affect, or desire for an intersubjective way of knowing and being that is not yet part of the grammar of whiteness.

This paper draws on literature from a variety of disciplines including Cultural Studies, Sociology, Education, Philosophy, Psychology, and Ethnic Studies. The paper largely pivots around Ahmed’s (2013) notion of economies of affect, DuBois’s (1910/2003) double consciousness and contemporary scholars’ various co-optations of it (Alcoff, 2015; Martinot, 2014; Yancy, 2016), and Leonardo and Manning’s (2015) notion of a White Zone of Proximal Development. Together, these concepts allow us to think about what substantiates the connective tissue between race and emotions, and how racial identity development, seen within a broader historical and sociocultural context, might expand our understandings of racialized affect (Berg & Ramos-Zayas, 2015).

The role of emotions in politics, racial relations and education are an important part of public discourse. Perceptual borders intensify into material borders through language, feeling, difference, and likeness. However, emotions that congeal into borders around particular ideas and bodies can also be scattered and redirected, for as Ahmed (2013) points out, “[...]what separates us from others also connects us to others” (p.29). It is thus prescient to continue investigating and problematizing the potential extant in and invested into racialized emotions. Particularly salient is the way white shame, guilt, empathy and love are discussed within educational contexts as transitive, intersubjective emotions that have the possibility of bridging a type of racialized duality - or double consciousness - that has anti-racist potential.

This paper calls for thoughtful consideration of how power dynamics play into the mobility of emotions and the political, racialized trajectories along which they travel. In educational praxis, we need to be mindful about what emotions represent, mean and do within the larger contexts of coloniality, race relations, and white supremacy. In search of practical interventions to whiteness, scholars discuss the impacts of a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Zembylas & Boler, 2003), “pedagogy of love” (Matias & Allen, 2013) and similarly debate the many guises of care in the classroom (Valenzuela, 2010; Matias & Zembylas, 2014). Shifting away from prescriptive approaches to pedagogy originating in questions such as “What can be done?” (Ahmed, 2013), this paper centers affect rather than efficiency in questions of pedagogy and curriculum in an effort to identify, linger in, and cultivate “a shared space and feeling of yearning” (hooks, 1992, p.13).

Author

• Blanca G Gamez, University of California - Berkeley