1Affect Theory: Omnibus Review

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys important studies in affect theory published in 2021. In contrast to earlier scholarship that sought to define affect by debating now-standard genealogies—Spinoza to Deleuze; Tomkins to Sedgwick—this snapshot of affect theory’s development reveals myriad approaches bookended by an epistemological divergence. On one end are studies that embrace affect as an umbrella term for moving beyond emotions in a normative key. In these studies, what affect does eclipses what affect is. On the other end are studies that assert dissatisfaction with the world as ‘given’ in theoretical models of affect, particularly as that world is always already colonial, patriarchal, white, and so on. In these studies, neither what affect does nor what affect is dismantles a world that precludes decolonization, Black flourishing and the flourishing of other minoritized subjects. In between, a number of the studies surveyed here lean in one direction or the other, suggesting that this divergence is nascent but influential. I position these studies along a tentative spectrum, from affect’s embrace to its dissatisfactions, while also noting other scholarly conversations into which affect has lately entered, notably autotheory and the emergent idea of ‘vibe theory’. The review is organized into the following sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Affect’s Embrace: Staging Feeling; 3. Intimacy, Pleasure, Skin: What Is the Scale of Affect?; 4. The History and Poetry of Public Feeling: Two Eras of Revolt; 5. On Refusing the World: Yao’s and Palmer’s Dissatisfactions; 6. Reflections.