Feeling Race

This advanced research seminar examines how emotion factors into a longer history of race, racism, and resistance in the United States. Using the tools of affect studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, and American literature and film, we will explore the racial politics of feeling, both as a noun and as a verb. What do emotions like rage, melancholy, shame, and irritation—as well as states of unfeeling or disaffection—afford for subjects marginalized by their race, gender, and sexuality? How do feelings include or exclude people of color, especially queer people of color, from projects of U.S. nation-building? Over the course of the semester, we will ask how feeling might reorient our relationship to troubled pasts, help us politically engage with a racist present, and imagine alternative futures.