How Racial Matter Comes to Matter: Memory Work, Animacy and Childhood Dolls

Abstract

Dolls have a long history in psychological and literary scholarship, and in popular culture. Many of these cultural products point to how dolls bring forth imaginaries of race and gender. Dolls, however, are not only figures of representation or identification. Dolls are agential in the ways they bring life to racialised, affective and embodied experiences. In this article, we develop an affective hauntology, applying memory work to explore how memories of childhood dolls can inform us about formations of race, racialisation and Whiteness. Applying Mel Y. Chen’s conceptualisation of animacy as an affective-material construction, we explore how dolls become ‘real and true’, bringing forth how racial matters come to matter as part of gendered subjectivities. Our memories of childhood dolls cut across different geopolitical and historical contexts – Eastern Europe, Western Europe and South-East Asia – revealing interesting differences and similarities in terms of processes of racialisation from the 1970s to 1990s.