From an intersectional and decolonial perspective, I reflect upon the performativity of whiteness and affect in the academic context by looking into the discursive evaluative stances (Nóbrega, 2009) in research as performance (De Fina, 2015) and race performativity (Melo, 2019, 2020). I defend we white scholars must center race matters and work on emotions as performative impressions (Ahmed, 2004) to foster "critical feeling" (Borges, 2017) in academia as a western/colonial/racist heteronormative/neoliberal/christian institution which compels us to remain active in the constant struggle for social justice and against power regimes of whiteness, if we are to render our work critical.
From an intersectional, decolonial and feminist perspective (Curiel, 2017), I reflect upon whiteness (Bento, 2002) in the context of academia (Ramos, 1958, Carneiro, 2005, Cardoso, 2020) and affective performativity (Ahmed, 2004) as a means to work through and for "critical feeling" (Borges, 2017), a concept I came up with in my Master's thesis to describe the becoming of sensitivity that moves us beyond thinking and acting critically while fostering critical/affective responses to the difference and the Other (Freire, 1970) in the struggle for social justice (Collins, 2017). In order to do so, I center matters of race when discussing how academia operates within power systems whiteness and I look into how emotions as social and cultural impressions (Ahmed, 2010) are mobilized in discursive performances (Butler, 2014) through evaluative language in context (Nóbrega, 2009), taking into consideration that performative identity practices (Bucholtz, 1999), especially race performativity (Melo, 2019, 2020), constitute semiotically constructed modes of acting, feeling and being in/ with the world (Borges, 2017). In this context, I defend we critical white scholars must center race matters in order to do work that is indeed critical as we do research amidst the constraints of power systems that act intersectionally within and across the power domains of a colonial matrix of domination (Collins & Bilge, 2016, Kilomba, 2019).
