Sylvia Wynter, racialized affects, and minor feelings: unsettling the coloniality of the affects in curriculum and pedagogy

This essay builds on the notion of ‘racialized affects’ in conjunction with recent educational theorizing of Sylvia Wynter’s work on ‘the human’ to consider how these insights might extend conceptualizations on the ‘coloniality of the affects’ in curriculum and pedagogy. Specifically, the analysis shows how bringing into conversation Wynter’s account on the overrepresentation of Western (White) Man with recent theorizations of ‘racialized affects’ and the ‘coloniality of the affects’ can make a significant contribution to unsettling affective norms and practices of contemporary schooling in societies shaped by ongoing White supremacy. The essay examines how White European bourgeois theories of affect are implicated in both colonization and racialization, thus naming and disrupting racialization can enable the use of affect theory in education to become more attentive to plural affective perspectives and histories (‘minor feelings’) and to support more just and equitable schooling.