654 Current Anthropology Volume 56, Number 5, October 2015 Racializing Affect A Theoretical Proposition by Ulla D. Berg and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas Despite the recent boom in scholarly works on affect from a range of disciplines, scant attention has been paid to the intersection of affect and racialization processes, either historically or in contemporary contexts. This paper situates the diachronic articulation of race and affect—particularly in terms of the historical everyday lives and the political, economic, and material contexts of populations from Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds—in anthropological studies of “racialization” and the “affective turn.” Drawing on a broad reading of both scientificandpopularconstructions of affect among Latin American and US Latino populations, we propose the concept of “racialized affect” to account for the contradictions embedded in the study of race and affect, both separately and at their intersections. We highlight what we see as the two cornerstones of our theoretical intervention: on the one hand, a conception of “liable affect” results in a simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other, and, on the other hand, a conception of “empowering affect” perpetuates the privileged and nuanced affective subjectivity frequently reserved for whites in the United States and for self-styled “whitened” elites in Latin America. In recent years, scholars have increasingly used the concept ured prominently in both scholarly discussions of “race” in the of affect to critique the long-held assumption that capital ac- Americas and popular representations of affective expressions cumulation and economic projects inherently conflict with (“Latin people” as hot-blooded being the most salient example). the intimate, affective realm of human experience, an assump- In this paper, we propose the concept of “racialized affect” as tion that has sustained distinctions between private and public, an analytical tool to examine the contradictions embedded in between “inner-world” and social contexts, and between sub- the study of race and affect, both separately and at their in- jectivity and political economy in anthropology and the social tersection. sciences. While some effort has been made in anthropology to In this preliminary attempt to theorize affect as insepa- situate affect in structures and relations of power—including its rable and in diachronic articulation with racialization pro- entanglements with normativity, inequality, and violence— cesses, we acknowledge that an analytical focus on affect gives us contemporary studies of affect have nevertheless developed a vocabulary to talk about intersubjectivity in a way that does rather independently of the scholarship on race and racial- not negate, but in fact necessarily evokes, a series of broader ization and outside the purview of critical examinations of material conditions and historical trajectories of which pop- “whiteness.” Yet, as we demonstrate here, racialization pro- ulations of color are highly conscious. Viewing affect not as an cesses have been integral to, and at times constitutive of, the expressed or observed emotional response or only as “a me- very conceptions of “emotion,”“feeling,” or “sentiment” that dium through which subjects act on others and are acted have historically produced, highlighted, and explained racial upon” (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009:62), we focus on the difference and served to uphold dominant racial ideologies. radically distinct, racializing, often public, and unequal ways Latin American migrants and US Latino populations have fig- in which affective practices, emotive manifestations, and eval- uations of personhood are experienced and lived among Latin American migrants and US Latinos. A perspective on “racial- Ulla D. Berg is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and ized affect,” therefore, contributes not just to scholarship on Hispanic Caribbean Studies/Anthropology at Rutgers University (Lucy affect and political economy within the discipline of anthro- Stone Hall, A wing, Room A262, Livingston Campus, 54 Joyce Kilmer pology but also to the scholarship on race, critical race theory, Avenue, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8040, USA [[email protected] migration, and Latino and Latin American studies, by pro- Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas .edu]). is Professor in the Department of Black posing a more nuanced examination of “racialization” that and Latino Studies at Baruch College and in the Center for Latin foregrounds political economy and historical context as in- American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center (One Bernard Baruch Way, 55 Lex- separable from the subjective complexity of racialized popu- ington at 24th Street, New York, New York 10010, USA). This paper was lations and national and international projects. fi submitted 10 II 14, accepted 24 I 15, and electronically published 17 IX While studies of affect have proliferated signi cantly in 15. recent years—inspiring some scholars to refer to an “affec- q 2015 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2015/5605-0003$10.00. DOI:10.1086/683053 This content downloaded from 132.174.254.010 on February 01, 2016 16:48:15 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Berg and Ramos-Zayas Racializing Affect 655 tive turn” in the social sciences (Clough and Halley 2007; Leys look at the dynamics within their own institutions to consider 2011; McElhinny 2010)—we depart from dominant concep- the nonpsychological, but emotive, manner in which “race” and tionsofaffectassolelyintensity,flow, and movement and at- practices of subordination and privilege are reproduced. tend specifically to the ways in which affect is embedded in Even among our own academic peers in Latino and Latin larger politicoeconomic projects. We are inspired by Ruth Leys, American studies, there is a justified concern that an emer- who masterfully criticizes Massumi and other leading cul- gent interest in “affect” could lead to a return to the very tural theorists for assuming that affect functions as a layer of cultural taxonomies that historically have served to racialize preconscious “priming to act,” such that embodied action is a US Latino and Latin American migrant populations, justify matter of being attuned to and coping with the world with- their marginalization, and explain (or explain away) their out the input of rational content and intentionality (see Leys poverty; these same taxonomies have also been the basis for 2011:442, n. 22). We subscribe instead to an “economies-of- the implementation of detrimental government and policy affect” perspective that considers affect as relational and actions (e.g., Gutiérrez 2001). This legitimate concern makes intersubjective, in contradistinction to the psychologically it imperative that we clarify that, unlike early anthropological individualistic conception of “emotion” and as a mediator of approaches that privileged static views of “culture” to explain economic transformations in particular materialist and his- variations in individual interiority and its social manifes- torical contexts (see Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Unlike tations or consequences, our perspective on affect centers on other scholars who also embrace this perspective, however, we a critical examination of the politics of race. We attempt to privilege how affect operates in the production of “race” and offer a productive lens to examine the ways in which racial in processes of racialization that accompany global capitalist systems are fundamentally designed to create unequal “struc- transformations and local neoliberal aspirations. We insist on tures of feeling” (Williams 1977) thatcomplicitlyreward asetof qualifying “affect” as “racialized” to emphasize the centrality “feeling rules” and “emotional work” (Hochschild 1979) and of racial projects that sustain US nationalism, imperialist and alternative forms of capital (Bourdieu 1977) while disciplining colonial interventions in Latin America, and the “emotional” and altogether stigmatizing others. Because we consider “ra- (in)equalities entrenched in “Latino” and “Latin American” cialization” to be a series of historical and politically informed prototypes. By adopting this conceptual lens, we remain at- nation-state projects (Omi and Winant 1994), we view “racialized tentive to affect as a vital set of dynamic registers of ev- affect” as endemic to social practices that are decidedly histori- eryday life, practices, and experiences. Neither affect nor race cal, rational, and, in some instances, intentional while also being occupies a bigger concentric circle in our analysis, as both are sustained through embodied practices that are phenomenolog- shaped by the particular political-economic contexts, micro- ical, reflective (and self-reflexive), and visceral. manifestations of everyday life, and the historical ordinary. In contrast to some academic work in the humanities in Although we realize that race is produced at the inter- which there has been a search for a foundational, nonratio- sections of other systems of power, we believe that, in the nal, even “presocial” formulation of affect, in our work we context of US imperial and colonial involvement in Latin donotwanttodismisstheroleof“intentionality” or ex- America and the politics of tractable “illegality” among Latin plain every racial project or affective racial practice as