Invisible Memories: Black Feminist Literature and Its Affective Flights

Abstract

This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.