Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English

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..