ABSTRACT
This chapter explores teacher resistance to engage with certain aspects of difficult histories and suggests that paying attention to affect does not only help us understand the formation of teacher resistance but also create productive openings for its disruption. Crucial to the emerging reconceptualization in the study of resistance is the notion of affect and its growing scholarly inquiry in the social sciences and humanities. In making a similar claim about teacher resistance in the context of teaching and learning difficult histories, the author suggestion is that the affective dimension of resistance helps educators appreciate and grasp “the operations of power and resistance at the more indeterminate level of sociality corresponding to bodies and their affective capacities”. The teachers’ act of opposition toward alternative dimensions of difficult knowledge is a performance that is emotionally regulated by hegemonic structures or norms of national identity and history teaching.
