Abstract
We question the question of affect and race as one that has already built itself upon blackness and anti-blackness, such that the question a priori for an affect theory seeking to address race, we argue, is that of black ontology. We first examine various works in affect theory that theorize race through new mechanisms of discourse, works that theorize interpersonal and emotive affects, and works that have contributed to a biopolitical understanding of race, affect, and assemblage. Delving deeper into a Deleuzian legacy of affect as capacity we assert that the theoretical works of afro-pessimism and black optimism (as black ontology) allows for generative thought around the materializations, value, and productions of racialized capacity—specifically the affective capacity of blackness. This work points to a vital direction for affect theory that can no longer dismiss or transcend race in a bid for a universal masked/marked posthumanism.
Highlights
Palabras claveCuestionamos la cuestión de afecto y raza como una pregunta que ya se ha construida a sí misma por sobre la negritud y la anti-negritud, de tal manera que la cuestión a priori para una teoría del afecto que busca abordar lo racial es, segun nuestro argumento, una ontología de lo negro
On race? and affectAffect, defined as the capacity to affect and be affected (Clough, 2007) highlights in its definition the amorphous and somewhat unwieldiness of its conceptualization
Our decision to begin this journey with the specific locality of affect and blackness is not a move to obscure a larger question of racial formation/or to ignore the field of race studies as a whole but instead, it is with adamant certainty that this understanding of blackness and capacity as representative of the potential of affect in relationship to race allows us to question normative uses of “race” as a heuristic device and as a “higher order” category of social stratification
Summary
Cuestionamos la cuestión de afecto y raza como una pregunta que ya se ha construida a sí misma por sobre la negritud y la anti-negritud, de tal manera que la cuestión a priori para una teoría del afecto que busca abordar lo racial es, segun nuestro argumento, una ontología de lo negro. Este trabajo señala una dirección vital para la teoría del afecto que ya no puede descartar o transcender lo racial en su apuesta por el posthumanismo universalista enmascarado/marcado. Blackness is not the pathogen in the afro-Pessimist imagination and it is a wonder how one could read it so, even as it is no wonder at all. Blackness is not the pathogen in afro-Pessimism, the world is. But the world, and maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world (Sexton, 2011, p. 31)
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