AfterAffects: New Methods in Affect Theory
A Virtual Symposium
Recordings here (available until 6/5)
How might theorists of affect reimagine the limits and affordances of their methods? By “afteraffects,” we do not mean a moving beyond or a getting over an “affective turn” that has been superseded or foreclosed. Instead, we seek to engage ongoing developments in the study of feeling, perception and emotion. Even as recent historicizations of the turn to affect highlight the unwitting universalism subtending certain conceptions of feeling, scholars of race, gender, sexuality, capitalism and empire continue to find bracing ways of taking up affect critically and experimentally, informed by theories of queerness, minorness, precarity and control that have come before.
This symposium gathers scholars who are asking how the field’s discontents can be thought alongside its promise for critique. It features compelling new work on a range of topics, from persistent characterizations of minoritarian feeling as opaque or incommensurate (too much or too little) to the affective affordances of narrative, genre, and media, from affect’s codification in practices of labor and sovereignty to its ambivalent relation to the historical, social, and pedagogical. AfterAffects promises energizing conversation about an influential field of inquiry and its capacity for remaking collective life.
Speakers: Xine Yao (keynote), Wendy Anne Lee, Vivian L. Huang, Sunny Xiang, Stephen Hong Sohn, Seulghee Lee, Rebecca Wanzo, Neetu Khanna, Nan Z. Da, Michael Dango, Mariah Min, Lara Farina, Ju Yon Kim, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Ianna Hawkins Owen, Églantine Colon, Cliff Mak, Benjamin Hagen, Annie McClanahan, Anca Parvulescu, Amber Jamilla Musser
View the full schedule of events here.
This event is supported by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, in part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We would also like to thank the English Department at the University of Chicago, as well as the Transnational and Ethnic American Studies Working Group and the Postcolonial and Global Anglophone Colloquium at UC Berkeley, for their support.
AfterAffects is organized by Cheng-Chai Chiang, Jo Nixon, Deborah Thurman, and Shirl Yang.
