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Subjectivity (2017) 10:6388 DOI 10.1057/s41286-016-0017-3
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1057/s41286-016-0017-3&domain=pdf
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The affective capacity of blackness
Colin Patrick Ashley1,2 Michelle Billies3
Published online: 24 January 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2017
Abstract Theorizing an affective capacity of blackness is an engagement with desires beyond the individual that bring together feelings, spaces, objects, bodies, and organic and nonorganic body parts into productive assemblages by leveraging the stickiness and ontological nature of blackness. After elaborating force and relationality as components of assemblages of blackness and describing the event of blackness as a moment of assemblage-making that is produced by and produces surplus value, we examine how surplus blacknesses as information are taken up through statistics and temporalities of risk in the management of populations. We then explore the potential of circulations of black affective resistance.
Keywords Affect theory Race Psychology Deleuze Blackness
Introduction
A signicant direction of affect theory has emerged through a paradigm of new materialist theory to rethink and often dismantle ideas of subjectivity that rely heavily on understandings of social construction, discourse, and/or performativity. This new materialist turn has sought to return to questions of ontology and being that have refused a dependency on mediated sociality (particularly linguistically
& Colin Patrick Ashley [email protected]
Michelle Billies [email protected]
1 The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, USA
2 Hunter College of the City University of New York, New York, USA
3 Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn, USA
64 C. P. Ashley, M. Billies
mediated sociality) and instead have highlighted the uidity, relationality, and mobility of matter itself (Barad 2003; Clough 2007, 2009; Hardt and Negri 2000; Grosz 1994, 2005; Massumi 2002, 2010). Questions of race and racial matterings are often demonized as inherently nonmaterial and sidelined to the eld of representationthe very eld that affect theory often seeks to avoid or circumvent. This often leaves under theorized questions of race within affect studies. Theorizing questions of race in relation to affect allows us to trace how certain racial formations manifest in forms of power as capacity (where race is other than construction, subjectivity or performance). Specically, we theorize an affective capacity of blackness as an engagement with desire beyond the individual that...