Laughing Off Modernity Into a Daoist Movement in China's Classrooms: A Decolonial and New Materialist Mapping

• In Event: Modernity, Coloniality, and Indigenous Knowledges

Abstract

De-colonial studies and new materialist thinking conjoin in their critique-suspension of modernity as a coloniality episteme for truth (re)production. By contrasting two lived laughter-provoked pedagogical experiences in China’s higher education, this paper exposes-transforms our assumptions of teaching/teacher, learning/learner, knowledge, affect, bodies, matter, space, and places toward a new materialist imaginary in three dimensions. First, the unexpected laughing melts down normalized unequal teacher-student configurations toward a corporeal democracy. Second, it further dissolves human subjectivity and the human-non-human boundaries, stretching corporeal democracy into an affective material flow across and beyond the classroom. Third, this material flow alerts us to a Chinese Daoist tianrenheyi movement, re-experiencing the materiality of classrooms as an Eastern dao-qi field that is autogenerated and experienced from within.

Author

• Weili Zhao, Hangzhou Normal University
  Presenting Author