Within this article, I attend to the slippages among sound, silence, noise, voice and ir/rationality to map out the ways white supremacist forces subtly moved with/in a primary classroom (NYC) through a host of bodies and sounds to reinforce processes of affective assimilation – or demands for first graders to ‘ feel white’. Specifically, I explore how particular sounds as well as the insistence on silence – that is, sound directed in a certain way – circulated within Readers Workshop to discipline students into ‘white’ affective rhythms. In effect, students – mainly boys of colour – who did not consume/produce the sounds of whiteness were initially labelled as ‘struggling readers’. I then show how students resisted the norm through their affective attachments to the book character Messy Bessey and my name/physical body. Ultimately, the students’ love for Bessey/me enabled new affective entanglements between humans and nonhumans that ran ‘pedagogical interference’ into the school’s mandated literacy curriculum and racialized identity scripts, thereby opening up opportunities for ‘struggling readers’ to become ‘successful’. I conclude by inviting literacy educators to consider what it might mean to say no to those space-times that make social and cultural discriminations possible and, in turn, say yes to other ‘fleshy’ worlds where more response-able ways of listening, sounding, knowing, being and doing exist.

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In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory of sonic epistemologies as a way to think and feel blackness, that is, to create otherwise worlds/knowledges/subjects. We argue that tuning into the sonic—or feeling with blackness—can help literacy educators thinking with affect to sense and develop nonhumanist ways of knowing/being/doing literacy, while simultaneously acknowledging the potential dangers of reinscribing whiteness. We propose that retheorizing affect in relation to blackness is necessary for literacy education, research, and ultimately, collective healing and justice.

Purpose The purpose of this article is to explore the sonic vibrations, infectious rhythms, and alternative frequencies that are often unheard and overlooked within mainstream educational spaces–that is, perceptually coded out of legibility by those who read/see/feel/hear the world through “whiteness.” Design/methodology/approach “Plugging into” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) posthuman theories of affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Henriques, 2010) and assemblage (Weheliye, 2014), the author argues that “literate bodies,” along with all forms of matter, continually vibrate, move, swell and rebel (Deleuze, 1990)–creating momentum that is often difficult not to get tangled up in. Findings This article maps out how a specific sociohistorical concept of sound works to affectively orient bodies and impact student becomings, namely, by producing students as un/successful readers and in/human subjects. At the same time, the author attends to the subtle ways that first graders rebelliously move(d) with alternative sonic frequencies to resist/disrupt mandated literacy curricula and white, patriarchal ways of knowing, being and doing. Originality/value This article highlights the political nature of sound and how, within mainstream educational spaces, certain sonic frequencies become coded out of white supremacist models for knowledge transmission, which re/produce racialized (gendered, classist, etc.) habits and practices of listening/hearing. Literacy educators are invited to “(re)hear” the social in more just ways (James, 2020) by sensing the affects and effects of more-than-human “sonic bodies” (Henriques, 2011), which redirect us to alternative rhythms, rationalities, habits and practices that challenge normative conceptions of what counts as literacy and who counts as successfully literate.