‘Whiteness’ vs ‘Otherness’: A Conceptualization of Race Through an Affective Lens

Résumé

Feelings and emotions are an intrinsic part of our everyday life and racialized bodies experience them profoundly and continuously. Through the skin and through the senses, race evokes an affective response. From anger to sadness, fear, and shame for both the dominant culture and the racialized minority, affect has shaped their interactions, dynamics, and relationships. Today, the separation between ‘us’ and ‘the other’ is still palpable within the context of social and political life. By understanding how bodies become racialized, the role of the skin as a visual representation of difference, the duality of melancholia and the concept of disidentification against dominant ideologies, this paper aims to demonstrate that affect and race are constitutive of each other. When looking at racial history through an affective lens, we see that it has been bound by emotions that happen in our daily existence; in instances, moments and encounters that leave a somehow permanent mark. Affect flows and gets stuck, it reveals stories of happiness and stories of trauma. It discloses other ways of knowing and other ways of learning. It helps us look at the past, dwell and learn from it to open new pathways in the lives of marginalized communities. It calls for an urgency to express unconformity toward racial formations and to understand how emotions circulate and move through our own bodies and through the world.