Affect Race Negativity, June 23rd & 24th, 2022, at silent green, Berlin
Affect Theory has been criticized for having a race problem (Yao 2021). In the same
instance, it has been stated that this problem cannot be resolved by perpetuating a logic
of inclusion, but that Black affect is constitutively irresolvable with the armory of theoretical
assumptions many thinkers of affect seem to share (Palmer 2021). The study of race,
and Blackness in particular, challenges the discipline to account for the making of
affectable others (Da Silva 2007) and to reassess political certainties that tend to
illegitimately equalize different structures of feeling (Ahmed 2007, 2020). In a reality
perforated by racial difference, affect constitutes a substance through which that
difference is reproduced and articulated in the most complex ways. White supremacy
does not only appear as brute violence (Palmer 2017, Guenther 2019) but can also take
on languages of compassion and empathy (Danewid 2017) to maintain and proliferate
the racial order. Reaching well beyond a mere diagnosis of the affective life of racism, the
analysis and critique of these affective techniques and practices touches upon the
production of the human and its limits (Jackson 2020). Therefore, the workshop
assembles suggestions for how the study of affect can function as an engagement with
the negativity of racial subjection. Not only does this concern the consideration of
structures of feeling in which any form of affective reconciliation is precluded. It also
requires questioning a naturalized notion of relationality as concept for understanding
politics, intimacy, and liberation.
