Sylvia Wynter, racialized affects, and minor feelings: unsettling the coloniality of the affects in curriculum and pedagogy

ABSTRACT

This essay builds on the notion of ‘racialized affects’ in conjunction with recent educational theorizing of Sylvia Wynter’s work on ‘the human’ to consider how these insights might extend conceptualizations on the ‘coloniality of the affects’ in curriculum and pedagogy. Specifically, the analysis shows how bringing into conversation Wynter’s account on the overrepresentation of Western (White) Man with recent theorizations of ‘racialized affects’ and the ‘coloniality of the affects’ can make a significant contribution to unsettling affective norms and practices of contemporary schooling in societies shaped by ongoing White supremacy. The essay examines how White European bourgeois theories of affect are implicated in both colonization and racialization, thus naming and disrupting racialization can enable the use of affect theory in education to become more attentive to plural affective perspectives and histories (‘minor feelings’) and to support more just and equitable schooling.

KEYWORDS:

• Affects
• coloniality
• racialization
• white supremacy
• curriculum/pedagogy
• Sylvia Wynter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sylvia Wynter is a Cuban-born Jamaican scholar who began her professional career as a professional dancer, actress and playwright, but stepped into academia and became a pre-eminent scholar on decolonial and anticolonial theories (Desai & Sanya, 2016). Her scholarly work has systematically emphasized how the colonization of the field of knowledge is embedded within the long history of Western imperialism and racial domination.

2. As Ngai (2005, p. 32, original emphasis) explains:

[I]n Uncle Tom’s Cabin it no longer matters what emotion, negative or positive, moves or animates the African-American slave; rather, his or her animated state itself becomes the primary object of the narrator’s quasi-ethnographic fascination. In this manner, the racialization of animatedness converts a way of moving others to political action (‘agitation’) into the passive state of being moved or vocalized by others for their amusement.

3. Poetry, literature, and the arts are powerful ‘tools’ to communicate the affective dimensions of Black life (Snaza, 2019a). Rankine’s (2014) book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, is offered here as such an example. The book is comprised of prose poems that attend to the everyday experiences of persons racialized as Black in the historical present. The poems reflect the affective complexities of racialization, racial violence and microaggressions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to recount how or which poetry, literature and the arts may contribute to recognizing the emotions of colonized communities and peoples. What is important here is to highlight the need to challenge the fundamental opacity of Black feeling within the onto-epistemological framework of the hegemonic ethnoclass of Man (Palmer, 2017)—in this case, in the context of curriculum theorizing and pedagogical practices.

4. As one of the anonymous reviewers points out, ‘An engagement of curriculum as key to formation of persons can also be brought to contemporary time of representation saturation which continues to engage the desires of its subjects through affective visual technologies.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michalinos Zembylas

Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia.He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation tosocial justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include: Affect and the rise of right-wing populism: Pedagogies for the renewal of democratic education, and Higher education hauntologies: Living with ghosts for a justice-to-come (co-edited with V. Bozalek, S. Motala and D. Hölscher).