The Racial Lives of Affect

Catalog description

This course explores both dominant and emergent theoretical paradigms that anatomize the affective dimensions of racialized subjectivity in the United States. We focus on theorists whose works promise to enhance and expand our understandings of race (many of whom might not be strictly categorized as working on affect per se). Some of these critics/theorists ask us to consider the more muted and quotidian textures of racialized feeling; others adopt approaches to embodiment and emotion by drawing from the new materialisms and ontological approaches to race; still others map versions of minoritarian identity predicated on a kind of affective refusal. We will put these critical/theoretical writings in dialogue with the works of authors who seem to “do race” differently, often by eschewing autobiography and realist narrative/drama and by experimenting instead