National Sentimentality and the Impasse of George Floyd’s Murder: A Case Study of Affective Practices in Textual Encounters about Justice in the English Classroom
Open AccessThis case study makes an argument that affective practices constructed in classroom discourse towards people, places, events, ideas, and objects in texts can support larger societal affective structures such as National Sentimentality. This case study finds that in the impasse of George Floyd’s murder, an affective temporal conceptualization of the present, an eleventh grade English class constructed affective practices which both supported and resisted National Sentimentality. Specifically, this dissertation argues classroom discourse took up mythology of the American government as an abstract system above the political fray to construct flows of desire towards the nation as the sole site of justice. Alternatively, classroom discourse about juvenile justice opened up an opportunity for fugitive pedagogy around the child as an object of feeling which disrupted flows of desire towards the nation as the sole site of justice. However, this work continued to occlude the key role of race in American juvenile justice practices. This study also makes an argument about temporality, arguing the feeling of time is key to either reifying or undoing National Sentimentality. This dissertation explores classroom discourse where connections between the past and present are constructed to be felt diffusely such that discourse ends by focusing solely on criminal injustices as happening in the present. Alternatively, discourse later in the unit explicitly works to construct affective practices to feel the past as near and connected to present injustices, producing flows of sympathy for Black Americans as victims of police brutality.
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Gulamhussein_gwu_0075A_16642.pdf | 2024-01-11 | Open Access |
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