- How does our embodiment in the classroom create moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters?
- Does being embodied within emerging institutional frameworks of diversity, specifically, dull the critical edge of queer theory and critical race theory (Ahmed 2012; Kwon 2018)? Does it necessitate new affective critical practices?
- Can centering affect as a part of our reading practice in the classroom help us bridge the critique/post-critique divide by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading?
- How does a productive combination of critique and attention to affect challenge traditional cultural studies learning objectives?
- How do the shifting models for academic labor affect our answers to all these questions?
Our presenters will help illustrate how answers to these questions converge around affect and pedagogy. We begin with affective rupture, a topic that much has been written about by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2012). In her analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem, Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished”: “Life has been seized … by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes begins by asking what other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, or a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly—mean in the classroom. Particularly when such moments involve non-human things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes approaches answers to the questions posed in Simon Gikandi’s Presidential Theme statement regarding the relation between the human and “the animal, the material, and the inanimate” through the space of the classroom. By indexing such moments between the human and nonhuman, Ioanes gives close attention to what she terms “subterranean affects,” the centering of which must alter our pedagogical practices.
Lauren Silber will then examine feelings of discomfort that emerge when discussing theory. Citing her experiences teaching students to approach emotions as both individualized states and elements of our social worlds, Silber explores how such a process can produce affective distance between the self students feel and the self they know. Silber’s presentation examines how the presence of affect theory is itself a type of interruption, arguing that it challenges traditional cultural studies learning objectives that are built upon firm boundaries between feelings and knowledge. In this way, Silber’s work explores the gap between paranoia and enchantment that might appear to separate critique and post-critique (Felski 2008), arguing that a pedagogy of affect gives us the tools to both critically examine our cultural studies work without dismissing felt knowledge out of hand.
Just as Silber finds the study of affect theory to interrupt models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and post-critique. If proponents of post-critical work hold that that critical hermeneutics obscure superficial or literal readings, others like Sianne Ngai argues that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures [rather] than subjective dispositions” (2017). Colton will discuss how a course examining the “New Sincerity” movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation, but also as catalysts for affective response that should be understood as historical and structural. He argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them, at both introductory and advanced levels, to discern the compatibility of affect and critical reading.
Our panel also seeks answers to Gikandi’s question about pedagogical models designed to teach community care work: “Is a pedagogy of care possible in late industrial society?” We build from recent work exploring whether pedagogical models organized around feelings of empathy are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, and neoliberal frameworks or whether, on the other hand, these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Tiffany Ball explores the limits and uses of empathy when teaching queer readings of American poetry in China, arguing that the production of shared feeling amongst ostensibly straight Chinese students, queer texts, and a queer American teacher enables the growth of a queer reading practice in which students are able to critique the disciplinary power of the homo/hetero binary. It is the ability to maintain models of difference and sameness simultaneously that allows for the instillation of such a reading practice.
As we consider how pedagogy might shape the study of affect, we will bring to the foreground the ways in which our inquiry must incorporate a variety of academic settings. The profession has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching and administrative positions, and interdisciplinarity. For that reason, we have included four speakers while limiting each to 10-12 minutes to promote discussion. Our speakers come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a postdoc teaching multimodal communication at a STEM institution, and a postdoc teaching queer theory at an institution in China. These settings help us illustrate how shifts in the profession that stifle our work can also be enlivened through experimental pedagogical practices.