Tuning into ‘fleshy’ frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom

Abstract

Within this article, I attend to the slippages among sound, silence, noise, voice and ir/rationality to map out the ways white supremacist forces subtly moved with/in a primary classroom (NYC) through a host of bodies and sounds to reinforce processes of affective assimilation – or demands for first graders to ‘ feel white’. Specifically, I explore how particular sounds as well as the insistence on silence – that is, sound directed in a certain way – circulated within Readers Workshop to discipline students into ‘white’ affective rhythms. In effect, students – mainly boys of colour – who did not consume/produce the sounds of whiteness were initially labelled as ‘struggling readers’. I then show how students resisted the norm through their affective attachments to the book character Messy Bessey and my name/physical body. Ultimately, the students’ love for Bessey/me enabled new affective entanglements between humans and nonhumans that ran ‘pedagogical interference’ into the school’s mandated literacy curriculum and racialized identity scripts, thereby opening up opportunities for ‘struggling readers’ to become ‘successful’. I conclude by inviting literacy educators to consider what it might mean to say no to those space-times that make social and cultural discriminations possible and, in turn, say yes to other ‘fleshy’ worlds where more response-able ways of listening, sounding, knowing, being and doing exist.

Reconceptualising early language development: matter, sensation and the more-than-human

“…However, such research has also been challenged by anthropologists, linguists and child language researchers, on the grounds that it assesses a narrow subset of language skills, fails to value cultural diversity, downplays the importance of culturally relevant texts and measures all children against the linguistic norms of the white, middle classes of the global North (e.g. Adair, Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove, & McManus, 2017;Ahrenkiel & Holm, 2020;Dernikos, 2020;Flewitt, 2005;Gee, 2014;Heath, 1983;Kuchirko, 2017;MacLure, 1999;Rosen, 1974;Viruru, 2001;Wells, 1977). Avineri et al (2015) condemn language-gap research for pathologising home language skills as 'a panacea for academic woes and social inequity' (p. 66).…”

Refusals, Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

“…Recently, the renewed attention to affect within the field of literacy (Leander & Ehret, 2019) has brought with it similar concerns, namely that literacy studies drawing upon posthuman and new materialist theories, which include theories of affect, have not adequately attended to issues of power and, as such, tend to undertheorize or overlook race and racism (Beucher et al, 2019; Dernikos et al, 2020; Nichols & Campano, 2017). Within this article, we acknowledge these critiques at the same time that we draw upon contemporary literacy scholarship on affect that has been vital to our conceptualization of affective literacies as emergent (Dutro, 2019; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Rowsell et al, 2018), material-discursive (Burnett & Merchant, 2016; Kuby et al, 2019; Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016; Lenters, 2016; Niccolini, 2019), vibrational (Dernikos, 2020; Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Wargo, 2019), and historical—that is, where the past unexpectedly emerges within present moments to trouble the humanist conception of time as discrete and linear (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Grinage, 2019; Jones & Spector, 2017; Lee et al, 2020; for timescales, see Compton-Lilly, 2011; for racial hauntings, see Johnson, 2017).…”

“…We draw upon this sociocritical scholarship to situate recent literature exploring affect in relation to the “whiteness of literacies” (Truman et al, 2020). In recent years, there has been a growing body of literacy research exploring how whiteness (as a force relation), racial inequalities, and otherwise possibilities (Crawley, 2017a) are mediated affectively (Dernikos, 2018, 2020; Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Grinage, 2019; Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2020; Niccolini, 2019; Snaza, 2019; Truman et al, 2020). What distinguishes this work from other explorations of affective literacies is that it “thinks with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) popular conceptions of affect or “what a body can do” alongside the work of scholars of color who may (e.g., Ahmed) or may not (e.g., Wynter) refer to themselves as affect theorists, but who nevertheless write about race and racism as ontological and affective forces with the potential to disrupt white, colonial legacies and worldings.…”

“…Rather, it maps out how the racialization of bodies (e.g., pedagogies, spaces) produces subtle affects and effects so that educators can work to become more critically conscious of the ways racism and whiteness affectively circulate, their own racial complicity, and how they themselves can disrupt its re/production by “adjust[ing] the relational field” (Grinage, 2019, p. 131). One way to adjust this relational field is to take seriously the role of refusals (Truman et al, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2014), which can take many forms, such as telling a different story that perhaps has remained lost or hidden (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020); refusing to construct reading and writing as linear, discrete processes that unfold solely within classroom spaces (Truman, 2019; Truman et al, 2020; Zapata et al, 2018); or even refusing those sonic frequencies and affective rhythms that make social and cultural discriminations possible (Dernikos, 2020; Jocson & Dixon-Román, 2020).…”

“…Historically, these fleshy hierarchies have been able to live on, namely through our cultural tendency to perceive skin color and other phenotypic traits as “proof” of distinct racial difference (Ohito, 2019). Rather than only view the flesh as a site of pain and exclusion, Crawley contends that we need to reclaim the flesh’s potentiality by reconstituting it as a vibrational zone we can tune into, embrace, and celebrate (Dernikos, 2020): a liminal zone where we can sense other space-time realities where different genres of personhood “beyond” the world of Man already always exist (see Weheliye, 2014). Referring to these zones as “black dimensionalities” of “otherwise possibilities,” he writes,The sonic announces the fact of ongoing vibration, some felt, some heard, always—however—moving, always abounding, always there.…”