Touched by injury: toward an educational theory of anti-racist humanism

Abstract

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial ‘crashing’ captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred.

Keywords:

• anti-racist humanism
• pedagogy of emotion
• psychoanalysis
• Crash
• injury
• affect in learning
• representation

Notes

Notes

1. Freud makes the original distinction between learning from and learning about. See Sigmund Freud, ‘On the teaching of psychoanalysis in universities’ (1919), vol. 17 of The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud.