Affective Strategies of Abolition Pedagogies in Higher Education: Dismantling the Affective Governmentality of the Colonial University

ABSTRACT

I highlight the importance of paying attention to the affective strategies of abolition pedagogies in higher education to mobilize abolitionist praxis. Affective strategies can make a contribution in either changing or reproducing the affective culture that has long been established at the colonial university. In the analysis here, I argue that the affective strategy of invoking sentimental empathy, which is often used in education when addressing issues of slavery, racism, and coloniality, is not only superficial but also reproduces colonial-feeling rules. Instead, I suggest a number of affective strategies—such as mobilizing affective solidarity with the affective worlds of marginalized students and identifying complicity, while engaging in anticomplicity praxes—that enable educators and students to begin imagining and enacting the abolition university. I argue that a more comprehensive understanding of abolition pedagogies in higher education can be attained by a heightened attention to the affective challenges entailed in abolitionist pedagogical praxis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Melamed (2015) wro that the term racial capitalism requires its users to recognize that capitalism is, by definition, racial capitalism, as capital is accumulated through relations of severe inequality among human groups. Importantly, emphasized Melamed, we often assume that racial capitalism is associated only with “white supremacist capitalist development, including slavery, colonialism, genocide, incarceration regimes, migrant exploitation, and contemporary racial warfare” (p. 77); however, as she emphasized, we need to recognize that contemporary racial capitalism also deploys liberal and multicultural terms of inclusion to fit its needs. I will come back to this idea in the last half of the article where I make the connection between sentimental empathy and liberal multiculturalism for the reproduction of racial capitalism.

2. Along similar lines, Chua (2020) also added that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has taught us, “abolition is not only about ‘absence’ (efforts to dismantle death-making institutions) but about ‘presence’ (building life-affirming and life-enabling communities in their place)” (p. 133). I come up to this dual orientation of abolition, namely, as both negative and affirmative later in the article, when I discuss the nature of affective strategies required for abolition pedagogies in higher education.

3. Rodríguez (2017, 2020) also referenced the idea of abolition as obligation, in a video for Critical Resistance and in a podcast interview he did with Beyond Prisons.

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Michalinos Zembylas

Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus; an Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa; and an Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social 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 (coedited with Vivienne Bozalek, Siddique Motala, and Dorothee Hölscher).