Towards an affective understanding of processes of racialization

Abstract

In this article, we apply developments from the affective turn—in particular, the concept of assemblages—to understand the relationship between race, affect, and emotions. We use the example of a Black CEO unsuccessfully hailing a taxi to show how race materializes with different intensities in specific settings, and how this operates in assemblage theory. We show that the emotion of “fear” plays a particularly important role in conditioning the way that race materializes with precise capacities in this specific encounter. In this way, race emerges as a particular version of race through the relational processes at work among the other elements of the assemblage, and the affects that emerge in the encounter—one of them, eventually, being fear. With regard to the affective turn, only some of those other elements are linked to a representational economy, while others work outside processes of cognition through their bare materiality, or their nonconscious habituation. We also highlight the productive power of discourse and hegemony in determining the outcome of assemblages. Because of America’s history, the CEO’s skin color is an especially pertinent component of the assemblage that limits his ability to act upon other components of the scene, most obviously his ability to achieve a desired action: hailing a cab.