The Circulation of Affects and Emotions in Racialized Encounters

• In Event: 2183 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Race and Emotions

Abstract

In this paper, we apply the developments of the affective turn and assemblage theory to race and emotions. We use the paradigmatic example of an African-American CEO unsuccessfully hailing a taxi to show how race materializes in particular scenarios and how this operates in assemblage theory. We show that the emotion of “fear” plays a particularly important role in determining the way that race materializes with particular abilities in this specific scenario. In answering the question, “Is the CEO unable to get a cab because of his race?” Our answer is yes, because race is an important element in the scene and the outcome of a particular encounter, but also no, because race is not working in isolation from the other elements of the scene and their capacities to affect and be affected. In this regard, race becomes a particular version of race in a process of intra-relationship with the other elements of the scene, and the affects that those elements produce within the encounter, one of them, eventually, being fear. In relation to the affective turn, only some of those mediations are linked to some sort of representational economy, while others work outside any process of cognition through their bare materiality. We also show that discourse and hegemony have a real power to produce outcomes: because of America’s history, the CEO’s skin color is an especially pertinent component of the assemblage that limits his ability to act upon other components of the scene, most obviously the taxi.

Authors

• Pablo Vila, Temple University

• Edward Anthony Avery-Natale, Mercer County Community College