Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Issue 1 (1st January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Truman, Sarah E.
• Is Part Of: Curriculum inquiry. Volume 49:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 110
• Page End: 128
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Subjects: English education -- inhuman -- affect -- Sylvia Wynter -- refusal; Education -- Curricula -- Periodicals; 375.0005
• DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0362-6784

Abstract

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.