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Abstract
This paper considers how literacy and education more broadly reflect and reproduce world views and communicative practices rooted in the western epistemological conceptualization of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man”. I frictionally think-with Wynter’s hybridity of bios and logos (mythoi), and more-than-human theories in relation to an in-school study in a secondary English classroom. I focus on how affect and refusal have the potential to operate as inhuman literacies that can unsettle the humanism of normative approaches to literacy education. Finally, I engage with Wynter’s homo narrans, which is the idea that we became who we are as a species in part through storytelling. While this storying capability has been used to uphold and reinforce the dominant world order, it also has the potential to rupture humanism from within.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Sylvia Wynter’s writings have influenced the more-than-human turn. I do not think it is accurate to call her a posthumanist or new materialist, but her work has helped to deepen and politicize these fields.
2 However, it also functions in the narrative construction of Man1 and Man2 and demonstrates and activates an Othering process. The idea of recognition and a “referent-we” who belong to a class, tribe, or kin, necessitates an “other” who does not (Wynter & McKittrick, Citation2015, p. 71).
3 Luciano and Chen use a pluralizing “s” at the end of inhumanisms, and although they acknowledge the Deleuzoguattarian notion of becoming-minor as a kind of inhumanism, they caution that many queer scholars have moved away from the notion of becoming. In my reading, this is because the idea of becoming may imply a direction or transition from one thing to another as if there were a specific end in mind or determinate telos.
4 While Cymru (Wales) itself was invaded and annexed in the Middle Ages by the Normans and the English and many present-day Welsh people still want to form a Republic, the UK as we now know it (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) became a wealthy society in part through Imperialism around the globe.
5 This could be read to mean that literacy is both a colonizing practice, and that literacy is “colonized” by neoliberalist ideals. When I say that literacy is a colonizing practice, I am referring back to Wynter’s discussions of Studia Humanitatis: under the order of Man1 and Man2, education has and still does operate as a civilizing (colonizing) process that neoliberalism is part of. To say that literacy is sometimes “colonized” by neoliberalism (in the case of new literacy practices being heralded as important skills for success by corporations) is a metaphoric use of the word colonization.
6 In Canada, I identify as a white settler but the term was unfamiliar to students in the UK.
7 Refusal is capacious; it is full of potential rather than merely a shutting down. And like any poignant and political action or term, refusal could be co-opted by dominant powers if we lose sight of its origins in how it is deployed in the social sciences.
8 van der Klaauw and Ooserbeek’s (Citation2013) article outlines how Muslim students’ performances deteriorate during fasting; and conversely, Yasin, Khattak, Mamat, and Bakar’s (Citation2013) study discusses how fasting does not affect cognitive performance.
9 Following the vote for Brexit, according to the Home Office Report in the UK (2016) “The number of race hate crimes increased by 15% (up 6557 to 49,419 offences) between 2014/15 and 2015/16” (p. 5). A concomitant (intersectional) issue is the fact that there was a 147% rise in hate crimes aimed at the LGBTQ community in July/August 2016 (since the Brexit vote) compared to the same period in 2015.
10 This critique builds on what Simpson (Citation2007) and Tuck and Yang (Citation2014) said above about the structure of social science research and the humanities as a colonial project, and the importance of “refusal”.
11 Theorizations of affect have been critiqued for neglecting to account for race and an inability to engage with issues of oppression. More recent writing on “affecting subjectivities” considers politics as processes of circulation and assemblage, rather than beginning with an autonomous subject (Ali et al., Citation2017). These recent turns in affect theories address the messiness of identity and representation.
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Notes on contributors
Sarah E. Truman
Sarah E. Truman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne where she researches English literary education with a specific focus on QT/BIPOC speculative fiction. Her research is informed by the feminist new materialisms with a particular interest in theories of affect, queer theory and speculative pragmatism. She is co-author of Walking Methodologies in More-than-Human World: WalkingLab; co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies and author of Searching for Guan Yin. She is co-director of WalkingLab, and one-half of the electronic music duo Oblique Curiosities. www.sarahetruman.com.