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.
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Notes
- 1.
I use Raymond Williams’ term “structures of feeling” here to refer to the complex of systems of beliefs, ideologies, and competing hegemonies that often go unarticulated, but rather appear in senses of things or affective social relations; what Williams described in Marxism and Literature as the “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (1997, 132). In my work, I emphasize that such structures are variable across social and cultural groups, and are in constant tension with competing local and global structures, as well as material and spatial conditions. Specifically, I argue that systemic and structural racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity are supported by fluid, but nevertheless dominant, structures of feeling, on the one hand, and contested by variable and also fluid structures of feeling as they manifest within marginalized communities, on the other.
- 2.
bell hooks coins this term to describe contemporary interlocking systems of domination in Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism. New York: South End Press, 1981.
- 3.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the organization of culture as rhizomatic rather than hierarchical. The rhizome, they say, includes the best and the worst of a thing. To understand culture as rhizome is to understand it as ceaselessly establishing “connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (1987, 7). There are no universals to establish cultural mores in this model, but rather relations of domination that produce normative cultural modes. I use this term in connection with Williams’ “structures of feeling” to emphasize the ways in which those structures are established—and contested—in part through the ceaseless connections between bodies, institutions, object, etc., that affects such as anger produce.
- 4.
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Rogers, J.A. (2019). Invisible Memories: Black Feminist Literature and Its Affective Flights. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_11
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