About the Book
Building on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.
Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Lisa Blackman, Rizvana Bradley, Ann Cvetkovich, Ezekiel J. Dixon-RomÁn, Adam J. Frank, M. Gail Hamner, Omar Kasmani, Cecilia MacÓn, Hil Malatino, Erin Manning, Derek P. McCormack, Patrick Nickleson, Susanna Paasonen, Tyrone S. Palmer, Carolyn Pedwell, Jasbir K. Puar, Jason Read, Michael Richardson, Dylan Robinson, Tony D. Sampson, Kyla Schuller, Gregory J. Seigworth, Nathan Snaza, Kathleen Stewart, Elizabeth A. Wilson
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: A Shimmer of Inventories / Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell 1
Part One. Tensions, In Solution
1. The Elements of Affect Theories / Derek P. McCormack 63
2. Ambiguous Affect: Excitements That Make the Self / Susanna Paasonen 85
3. Tomkins in Tension / Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson 103
4. Affect and Affirmation / Tyrone S. Palmer 122
5. Unfuckology: Affectability, Temporality, and Unleashing the Sex/Gender Binary / Kyla Schuller 141
Part Two. Minor Feelings and the Sensorial Possibilities of Form
6. Minor Feelings and the Affective Life of Race / Ann Cvetkovich 161
7. Resisting the Enclosure of Trans Affective Commons / Hil Malatino 179
8. Too Thick Love, or Bearing the Unbearable / Rizvana Bradley 191
9. Migration: An Intimacy / Omar Kasmani 214
Part Three. Unlearning and the Conditions of Arrival
10. Unlearning Affect / M. Gail Hamner 233
11. Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake / Nathan Snaza 255
12. The Feeling of Knowing Music / Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson 273
Part Four. The Matter of Experience, or, Reminding Consciousness of Its Necessary Modesty
13. Nonconscious Affect: Cognitive, Embodied, or Nonbifurcated Experience? / Tony D. Sampson 295
14. Catch an Incline: The Impersonality of the Minor / Erin Manning 315
15. Emotions and Affects of Convolution / Lisa Blackman 326
16. Haunting Voices: Affective Atmospheres as Transtemporal Contact / Cecilia MacÓn 347
Part Five. A Living Laboratory: Glitching the Affective Reproduction of the Social
17. The Affective Reproduction of Capital: Two Returns to Spinoza / Jason Read 367
18. Algorithmic Governance and Racializing Affect / Ezekiel Dixon-RomÁn 384
19. Dividual Economies, of Data, of Flesh / Jasbir K. Puar 406
20. Algorithmic Trauma / Michael Richardson 423
Coda 447
A Note / Kathleen Stewart 449
Poisonality / Lauren Berlant 451
Contributors 465
Index 471
About the Author :
Gregory J. Seigworth is Professor of Communication and Theatre at Millersville University.
Carolyn Pedwell is Professor of Cultural Studies and Media at the University of Kent.
Review :
“The Affect Theory Reader 2 surveys the burgeoning field whose development its predecessor did so much to catalyze. In the intervening thirteen years, the study of affect has spread its capillaries across an ever-growing spectrum of disciplines, while at the same time expanding the scope of its own problematics. This new anthology skillfully presents a much-needed digest of the state of the field today. The essays it brings together address a wide range of topics, opening new perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our time, including, in a reckoning that is long overdue for the field, an emphasis on issues of race. This is an excellent and timely volume that readers interested in affect studies and allied areas will find indispensable.” - Brian Massumi, author of (Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism) “The essays in The Affect Theory Reader 2 offer galvanizing, clarifying experiments with thought and form. Wholly reimagined from its previous incarnation, this ‘cluster of attunings’ showcases the maturity of this line of inquiry and so many of its emergent conversations, while at the same time finding the mettle to rethink the origins and legacies of ‘affect theory’ as such. An exciting offering for anyone who imagines the minor registers of experience deserves an unmistakably major volume.” - Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham University "Much of The Affect Theory Reader 2 calls attention to how theory and practice co-constitute each other rather than oppose one another." - Jack Warren (Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory)
