Afetos da branquitude na formação de professores: Por uma ética decolonizante

Abstract

This autoethnography problematizes conflicting affections of my own whiteness as a teacher trainer at a university campus in the North of Brazil. The Federal University of Tocantins campus in Porto Nacional figures as a powerful research site, since it reveals the growing mobility/occupation of black and indigenous bodies in territories where white corporealities have predominated, disrupting the ‘good life’ that has been triumphing over the western world since the post-war period. I’m initially based on authors such as B. Espisona, S. Freud and J. Lacan, who contribute to situate the affective, imagery and bodily field according to its psychic and social transformation power. However, decolonial authors like Frantz Fanon and non-white bodies narratives/performances were the ones that have brought my own body and affectations to the center of this research, by locating racism at the heart of the relationality modes in western world, and also helping to situate affective life as an instance to be historically and bodily situated. Scrutiny of my own whiteness is based upon five scenes with which I interact, as well as actors who “occupy” the referred campus, according to the five mechanisms by Paul Gilroy (2004; 2006): negation, acknowledgment, guilt, shame and reparation. Unlike the propositions that maintain affection restriction logic towards the marketing and individualistic interests, translated as ‘socio-emotional competencies’, the decolonizing ethics herein introduced is linked to the aesthetic appeal, to the potency of non-white corporeities, to a profoundly social Psycology. Such possibility is rooted in the access and permanence of public policies which ensure the admission and permanence of black and indigenous students, professors and employees at the universities.