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

Affect Theory and Critiques of Anti-Blackness

Affect is a rather rangy and capacious concept, making it a substantial source of tension for those who wish to pin it down (Seigworth, 2017). As no one theory exists, affect has been described in many ways: as forces, energies, moods, and intensities. Largely drawing upon the poststructural philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), contemporary affect scholars tend to theorize affect as nonconscious, visceral bodily forces that register within and across bodies of all kinds (e.g., humans, books, sounds) to shape a body’s capacity to affect and be affected. Rather than employing a singular and enclosed view of subjectivity, these scholars conceptualize humans as porous and permeable human–nonhuman assemblages, or complex constellations of unfolding bodies saturated with affect (Leander & Boldt, 2013). Such assemblages are dynamic and ever-changing, coming together in various ways to create new im/possibilities for subjects, thereby increasing↔decreasing their capacity to act, affect.

By radically refiguring the human as an assemblage of more-than-human entities, affect scholars move away from linguistic/discursive analyses that center the making of individual human subjects, and toward nonrepresentational analyses that map out how bodies are produced relationally. In doing so, they seek to disrupt the Cartesian notion of the self-contained rational subject of Western humanism. By humanism, we mean a violent, colonial, and imperialist process of exclusion that produces particular White males, or Man, as “the human” and white supremacy as “the world” (Crawley, 2020; Snaza, 2019; Wynter, 2003).

Despite the desire to disrupt exclusionary humanist frameworks, affect theories have not escaped critique. One concern is that affect has often been taken up in ways that either dismiss or transcend issues of race, blackness in particular (Ashley & Billies, 2020; Palmer, 2017). For instance, within Deleuzoguattarian conceptions, affect has been viewed as an ontological capacity of bodies, yet what is largely ignored is how—within a white supremacist sorting system—Black bodies are not endowed with the same agentive capacity to affect and feel (Ashley & Billies, 2020; Palmer, 2017). So, while affect theories aim to decenter the White, heteropatriarchal figure of Western Man, they don’t necessarily explore how this version of the human has been produced in relation to blackness and the abjection of Black bodies.

According to Ashley and Billies (2020), “Blackness—and anti-blackness—is widely cited as the (continual, scientific, philosophical) birth of the human, which is also the birth of the world” (p. 9). As Wynter (2003) argues, Man is an invention, an overrepresented genre linked to European Enlightenment metanarratives, which function to produce Man as “the only permissible mode of being human” (Snaza, 2019, p. 3). Building on Wynter, Weheliye (2014) critiques Deleuzoguattarian philosophies for ignoring the complex ways that race, as a sociopolitical category, is both articulated and used by the powers that be to hierarchically sort people into genres of non/personhood: “full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (p. 3). In effect, the further one is from the normative subject position of Man, the less likely one will be treated as a human being. In other words, the universal notion of to “affect and be affected” primarily applies to those who have been classified as “full humans.”

Affect figures into this negation of blackness and Black subjectivity “through the inability to see or think Black feeling” (Palmer, 2017). In the United States, we tragically see this negation of “black affect” unfold day in and day out when the fears and feelings of White police officers (“white affect”; Muñoz, 2000) seem to matter more than the fears and feelings of Black human beings. As Wanzo (2015) powerfully asserts, when fear of Black bodies becomes reasonable in a court of law, it somehow “privileges affect of the [white] state over the affect of [Black] citizens,” which historically has served to affirm white fear and make the killing of Black lives “permissible” (p. 230). As such, affect is neither neutral nor divorced from power relations that work to maintain the social, cultural, and political inequalities that make white supremacy and “violences of the ordinary” (Hill, 2016) possible.

A Theory of Sonic Epistemologies: Feeling with Blackness

Drawing upon a wide range of critical scholarship (e.g., Butler, Spillers, Wynter), Crawley (2017a, 2017b, 2020) theorizes how sonic epistemologies offer both a critique of white supremacist Western knowledge regimes and a celebration of the “fleshiness” of Black sociality and thought. According to Crawley (2020), whiteness, which is grounded in Western philosophical and theological ideologies, is a violent encounter that produces exclusions, namely by announcing difference of any kind as a problem for Western thought and, in consequence, seeing Black life as “that which is not worth thinking with [or about]” (p. 6). Such categorical exclusions are made possible via rational, humanist discourses that draw upon Enlightenment metanarratives privileging reason, individuality, autonomy, stillness, and disembodiment. These metanarratives, associated with the Cartesian notion of the mind as the seat of consciousness, create an ontological distinction and a hierarchical dualism between mind (consciousness) and matter. Within such logic, rationality can only be accomplished by splitting the mind (coded as white and masculine) from the emotions and fleshy body—that is, splitting the active subject of knowledge (Man) from both the “passive” objects of knowledge (i.e., things) and those deemed “undesirable” (e.g., Blacks, Native Americans, women) (Crawley, 2017a). As whiteness is a project that seeks racial purity (Crawley, 2020), this knowing, enlightened subject effectively equates to a profoundly racialized subject—that is, White Man, the only “true” producer of knowledge. While Crawley does not deny that whiteness produces a genre-specific subject (Wynter, 2003) that is also gendered, classed, and heterosexualized (among other things), his main point is that anti-blackness and blackness cannot historically be understood outside of these humanist and Enlightenment metanarratives. In other words, “to think theologically, to think philosophically, is to think racially” (Crawley, 2017a, p. 12).

To build an argument for moving away from whiteness and toward sonic epistemologies, Crawley further examines whiteness as an ocularcentric way of knowing/being/doing that hierarchically sorts Black bodies, in particular, into genres of nonpersonhood—as “not-quite-humans” or “nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014). That is, through the sense of sight or vision, Black bodies get seen/coded/read in a myriad of violent ways, for example, as ungovernable, out of control, terrifying, noisy, bothersome, violent, discardable, antagonistic, and in need of remediation (Hill, 2016; Johnson, 2017). Above all, Crawley (2017a) views whiteness as “theft.” To be considered “normal” within the white supremacist logic of Western humanism, one has to be rational, efficient, self-possessed, and still—which literally demands a holding of one’s breath. In this way, whiteness robs one of the capacity to breathe, to feel, to dwell in sociality, to “share in the materiality of that which quickens flesh” (p. 40). And, it robs us of the knowledge that human beings—along with all forms of matter—sonically vibrate with fleshy, affective potential.

As an alternative to whiteness, sonic epistemologies highlight sensual, im/material, and affective encounters, or alternative ways for organizing and producing thought that embrace feeling with blackness. Crawley conceptualizes blackness as a refusal to renounce the flesh, noting that the renunciation of the flesh is how the ideal humanist subject (i.e., Man) gets produced in the first place. By “flesh,” Crawley here is building upon Spillers’s idea of the body as discursive and the flesh material. According to Spillers (1987), the abjection of Black bodies has been made possible through disciplining mechanisms (e.g., via slavery—whips, via the present—bullets) that violently mark(ed) human flesh to create and maintain oppressive racial hierarchies. 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. . . . Black thought is the elaboration of the sonic capacity. . . . Blackness is the celebratory mood and movement, the posture and possibility of feeling something and being open to such feeling as a locus for structuring existence. Blackness, in other words, accepts vulnerability, openness, refusal to enclosure, as a fact of the flesh and moves with such acceptance against the impositions of a violent settler colonial and anti-black racist logic. Such vulnerability is about the capacity for being moved, and about such movement producing alternative ways of existing in worlds. (pp. 50, 56)

Again, blackness here does not refer to a coherent, essential subject position. Rather, blackness is an (onto)epistemology, a way of life that honors the vibrating flesh by refusing settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and the idea that there is one world, one way to be human. According to Crawley, these fleshy energies emerge as we think and feel the world in otherwise ways—that is, in ways that do not affirm Man and the violent world of white supremacy. He goes on to say that these vibrational energies must be felt, as feelings resonate with multiple potentialities. Resonance here is a form of affect that recognizes feeling↔sound as vibrational waves moving and affecting matter. These felt vibrations can be transmitted through both linguistic (e.g., shouting) and nonlinguistic (e.g., gestures) utterances. As such, feelings, words, voices, movements, gestures, literacies, sounds and so on are relationally entangled and mutually co-constituted (Dernikos, 2020; Hackett & Somerville, 2017).

Ultimately, for Crawley, sonic epistemologies open up ways for us to connect, to be in conversation, and to engage with one another relationally, “where we each are, and push each other to reach beyond and differently, to unlearn so that we might” learn the world differently (Patel, 2016, p. 83). As a concept, then, it does not belong to any one group of people. It is open to us all as an unfolding, capacious way of life that not only refuses anti-Black violence but is also committed to equity—with an understanding that, within a white supremacist sorting system grounded in violence and exclusion, “unless Black lives matter, no lives matter” (Journal of Literacy Research, 2020). That said, attuning to otherwise worlds is by no means a utopic process (Crawley, 2017a)—a search for otherwise doesn’t guarantee that the worlds we open up and create are any less violent (as we ourselves came to discover while staying and lingering within/across re-turns). There is always the danger of re-centering whiteness and white supremacy, despite our good intentions. Yet, “black dimensionalities” where otherwise ways of performing human—not predicated on Man and sociocultural racialization—do exist. Not only are these worlds possible, but they are (as we explore in re-turn 3) joyful, pleasurable, and affirming (Crawley, 2017a).

A Place to Re-Turn to

The data scene that we re-turn to throughout comes from my (Jaye’s) 5-year-long project working alongside children, places, things, and more at the Playhouse. In May 2013, the Playhouse opened as a result of a partnership between the local food bank and university with the goal of providing children with a free after-school and summer activity space where they could receive after-school snacks and, during summertime, free lunches. Inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education, class-sensitive pedagogies, and theories of social critique and justice, the Playhouse also aimed to provide children with an environment where they could be seen as full of potential, competent, and capable of building and expressing their own theories about themselves and their social worlds. On any given day, the Playhouse bustled with the energy of 20 to 40 children between the ages of 2 and 13 years, all eager to engage with university-affiliated researchers and preservice teacher interns. Racial identities fluctuated from year to year, but mostly the children living in the community identified as Latin@ (Mexican American and El Salvadorian) and Black when disclosing their racial and cultural identities to Playhouse adults.

My introduction to the community of South Woods was quite serendipitous. The rental community is located off the beaten path and hidden away on the outskirts of the county and the limits of the city. I was only made aware of the community through an exchange between a colleague who had been approached by the owner of the rental community to provide programming to the families and young people there (for more on our initial involvement with the community, see Jones et al., 2016; Thiel & Jones, 2017). Being a White woman in academia, I understood what my presence may represent for families. Therefore, it was extremely important for me to listen deeply to the desires of residents (both young people and adults) in my interactions and development of programming. I proudly grew up in a working-class/wage-poor home, and it is here that I initially found deep connections and understanding between my experiences and the experiences of the families living in South Woods. But it was the superhero play the young people crafted together that connected the young folks’ play lives to my own. We bonded over superhero stories and films within the first month, and that bond continued for the 5 years of our season in life together during this strange and wonderful community project.

Collectively Gathering around Theory

Drawing on postqualitative (St Pierre, 2011) inquiry, we think-with-theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to help us trouble the ways that “legible” academic research has historically centered whiteness and anti-blackness. According to Sharpe (2016), such modes and methods do violence to our capacities to feel/hear/think/read/see/imagine otherwise. Rather than utilize a preexisting methodology with a predetermined set of processes, we engage in a relational, embodied approach that enables us to “read” data through various theoretical lenses. Here, we treat data as agential matter that calls forth open-ended and otherwise possibilities—as opposed to a still object we can code, dissect, and examine for conclusive patterns.

Specifically, we think-with-theories of affect (Seigworth, 2017) alongside Crawley’s (2020) theory of sonic epistemologies, or feeling with blackness, so as to embrace the messiness, abundance, and radical refusal of affect/feeling/sound to contain literacies, literate bodies, subjectivities, and social worlds. Our desire is not representational certainty, but rather, to evoke feeling differently about what it means to be human and to know/be/do literacy. The elusiveness of sound (which is a kind of affect) leaves open the possibility for us to imagine otherwise worlds that can be sensed when attuning to the feel of fleshy vibrations. Ever present, these vibrations may go unnoticed unless one turns intense attention to them (Crawley, 2020).

Building on Crawley’s (2020) idea of returns, we gather together to focus on one event to engage in what we call re-turns, which involve revisiting the same data scene at three different points in space-time so as to “tell” these moments otherwise. As Crawley (2017a) argues, otherwise possibilities refuse coherent tellings. By reimagining the social and what it means to be human, re-turns serve as acts of refusal against the violent settler colonial and anti-Black world of humanism—a world that does not serve our collective humanity, that attempts to divide and separate us from one another (Dillard, 2012). Re-turns—which here take the form of a thrice-told tale—remind us that the social is far from stable and orderly. As such, the fleshy unruliness of life and experience can never be captured and definitively represented by a singular authoritative account that promises an objective or “adequate version of a more or less discrete ‘other world’” (Clifford, 1988, p. 25, as cited in Wolf, 1992, p. 129). While these re-turns are small moments that don’t necessarily bring about “any grand political change” (Niccolini, 2019, p. 91), they perhaps can, all together, affectively jam the system (Truman, 2019) that keeps Man, white supremacy, and humanist metanarratives in place—that is, Western science’s “longing for one true story” (Harding, 1986, p. 193).

By refusing such metanarratives, we align with Black and feminist scholars who seek to trouble positivistic framings of research. These scholars do so by engaging in experimental practices that encourage improvisation, storying, genre blending, and materiality (St Pierre, 2011; Strom et al., 2019), while embracing the wisdom of Black thought/feeling/sociality (Crawley, 2020; Dillard, 2012; Johnson, 2017; Ohito, 2020; Sharpe, 2016). This scholarship encourages us to become “undisciplined” and helps us to recognize that such things as data saturation are tied up in a long history of research practice that is dehumanizing, disembodied, racialized, classist, patriarchal, neoliberal, and so on. For some, our choice to focus on one data scene may initially seem strange—after all, we have been “trained” to see such research as lacking in “credibility,” “validity,” and “reliability.” But one event is never just one event. One event in the present is always connected to events in the past and possible futures (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020). In this way, re-turns are porous and permeable stories with vibrational energies that “breathe into one another” (Crawley, 2020, p. 10)—stories with no real beginning and no real end, stories that contain sonic vibrations that modulate on and on and on, from one moment to another.

Having both experienced moments where our personhood wasn’t respected (Jaye as a child from a working-class family living in the South and Bessie as an emergent bilingual child with a Greek immigration experience), we are aware of how small moments can do harm to others, but we also realize that we have all been “seduced” by racialized histories of oppression (Dillard, 2012) that create blind spots. Part of our process when thinking with sonic epistemologies was to explore how easy it is to pick up theories like affect—that don’t center Black bodies and lives—and never address issues of whiteness, classism, heteronormativity, and so on. This both troubled and pushed us to revisit one data scene. We chose this particular moment (re-turn 1) because I (Bessie) had heard Jaye present on it before (although I wasn’t present in the moment that re-turn 1 happened). I was struck by the reading of the boys’ play as “violent”—not because I sought to judge this moment, but rather, because I wondered how I too might be privileging white supremacist discourses in my own research and teaching, albeit unintentionally. Soon, we (Jaye and Bessie) began to discuss how affect theory felt dangerously seductive, with its promise of nonrepresentational possibilities. Yet Deleuze, unlike Crawley, didn’t help us grapple with the overt and subtle violence of the current historical moment—or even begin to sense and appreciate the joyful emergence of nonhumanist, fleshy worlds (Dernikos, 2020).

At the same time that we wonder(ed) about affect theory, we do recognize that there is scholarship that “thinks with” affect to trouble the whiteness of literacies (our work included). We are not proposing, then, that we do away with affect, but we are encouraging educational researchers to retheorize affective literacies in relation to blackness. This approach requires us to think with and learn from Black scholars who have long been thinking through issues of embodiment and feeling. If we are to sense how race affectively operates in our teaching, research, and service to affirm that Black lives and literacies matter, then we must be in conversation with Black thought, sociality, and scholarship in our everyday academic endeavors.

Swords and Shields: Re-Turning to the Event

In our attempts at refusal, we revisit one particular playstory at the Playhouse that I (Jaye) recorded on video at the request of the boys doing the playing. The event happened on a summer afternoon (in June 2015) at the Playhouse. Summer was always my favorite time there, as the young folks seemed a bit more relaxed and playful than during the school year, when they faced concerns with early morning bus pickups, homework, and curfews. Conversely, summer was a chance to sleep in, stay out late, and engage intellectually in ways they saw fit. On this particular day, the boys came inside to a new collection of scraps to tinker with, including fabric, boxes, and refilled paints. It was the cardboard scraps that caught their eye first, and soon four of the boys had chosen to play with the purple cardboard that had held the fruit that was used for snacks. The cardboard was sturdy, and wavy, and just the right size to become a shield, similar to the one Captain America uses in his movies and comic books.

The boys–having recently learned about knights, alongside Captain America’s popularity–saw the cardboard shields as an entryway into a remixed world of pretend that unfolded in creating costumes and cardboard swords to complete their transformation into knights-superheroes. When finished with costuming and props, they asked me to video record their enactments on the playground. I obliged. In the video, the boys enact a typical fight sequence. Using half of the playground, the boys run, jump, and fence with one another, only stopping briefly to reset bent shields or swords or resituate costume accessories. Spoken language is used sparingly, while bodily actions are used most often to communicate. Every now and then, you can hear me (Jaye) laugh in the background, but most of the time a viewer will only hear the boys, and they are the only people in view during the shot.

I have enjoyed looking back and sharing this video data professionally on many occasions, and during that time, it has gone through many different analytical readings. In what follows, we re-turn to three of these analytical readings. We do so to illustrate how theory comes to matter in world-making practice and why which theories we use or privilege alter what gets noticed or counted in our analysis.

“Otherwise, Nothing”: Refusing Conclusions

To say that words fail us here is an understatement. We haven’t quite captured the sounds of play-laughter-movement-joy/our bewilderment-confusion-wonder. But perhaps that is a gift as well (Crawley, 2017a). It keeps us open, on the move, desiring something different, something otherwise. While we have acknowledged throughout that our readings of this one data scene are but one possibility, we can’t ignore that we—two White, female researchers from particular social locations—may not be reading these re-turns in the same ways as the young Black and Brown boys whose play we story here. And while the boys did share their superhero adventures with Jaye and invite her to film their play, they didn’t check the telling of these tales here (something Jaye acknowledged in retrospect). Of course, in no way do we claim to speak for the boys, yet by inserting their “voices,” we do speak about them (Wolf, 1992). We never intend to do so with authority, but since whiteness has been “our” default norm (Muñoz, 2000), there is always the danger that the stories we tell as researchers—while partial and incomplete—may harm, which is why “we are charged with producing otherwise in the cause of justice” (Crawley, 2017a, p. 27).

Re-turning, then, to one small moment over space-time highlights how putting affective literacies in conversation with blackness becomes a matter of ethics. As an ethics project, re-turning recognizes the violence of humanism and how whiteness, as a humanist force, functions to limit otherwise possibilities. Our gathering together here also illustrates how—even though we are both committed to justice and have written about racial literacies in the past—detecting the subtle ways whiteness circulates and nonhumanist worlds emerge isn’t always easy. But the reality is that neither is openly discussing race and racism, which may be dangerous, risky, and painful, yet vitally necessary given the fact that racial categorizations continue to divide, dehumanize, and even kill (Dillard, 2012; Oluo, 2018; Sharpe, 2016). For instance, as re-turns 1 and 2 suggest, the way we as educators talk and think about race may be in tension with how our bodies feel and act upon racialized histories (Grinage, 2019; Johnson, 2017). That said, re-turn 3 reminds us that otherwise possibilities always exist once we tune into sonic epistemologies that affirm the lives, literacies, and social worlds of the young people we teach, learn from, and live with every day.

As sonic epistemologies are antithetical to the representational logic of Western humanism—that is, to containment, settlement, and conclusion—we refuse final closure here. Refusals are relinquishments, and relinquishments are about relationality, openness, something yet to come (Crawley, 2020). As Crawley (2020) beautifully writes, “we let things go only in order to receive” (p. 235). With that in mind, we leave you with this provocation:

What would it mean for literacy researchers who take up affect to feel with blackness—to begin with Crawley and other Black scholars rather than Deleuze?

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