We are a group of critical theorists who read, thought, wrote, and practiced together while living in New York City during the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and recently the US presidential election. While our biographies span multiple geographies, we met as researchers, theorists, teachers, and activists across a diverse number of campuses in the city's largest public university, the City University of New York. This special issue emerged as affect studies provoked our imaginations independently in ways that felt crucial for the development of our respective and reflexive political and theoretical projects. We entered the complexities of using affect studies, inspired especially by the generative tension of theory 'versus' practice. Through a collective process of collision and creativity, we experimented with what affect studies could do for our intellectual and political commitments, affecting subjectivity to politicize affect.In this piece, we introduce this special issue, which advocates for affect studies as a mode of critical inquiry of use to radical projects of queerness, blackness, disability, decolonization, and temporalities of the body, a turn that is dependent on our re-engagement with subjectivity. After reviewing the legacy of scholarship on subjectivity to which our work is both continuing and responding, we discuss the debates around the role of the subject in affect studies and the political dimension of affect before thinking through the contributions of the five pieces in this special issue. Collectively, we are affecting subjectivity through an attention to matter, the non-conscious, and identity, and politicizing affect through an attention to form,
We question the question of affect and race as one that has already built itself upon blackness and anti-blackness, such that the question a priori for an affect theory seeking to address race, we argue, is that of black ontology. We first examine various works in affect theory that theorize race through new mechanisms of discourse, works that theorize interpersonal and emotive affects, and works that have contributed to a biopolitical understanding of race, affect, and assemblage. Delving deeper into a Deleuzian legacy of affect as capacity we assert that the theoretical works of afro-pessimism and black optimism (as black ontology) allows for generative thought around the materializations, value, and productions of racialized capacity-specifically the affective capacity of blackness. This work points to a vital direction for affect theory that can no longer dismiss or transcend race in a bid for a universal masked/marked posthumanism.
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