Racializing Affect A Theoretical Proposition

Despite the recent boom in scholarly works on affect from a range of disciplines, scant attention has been paid to the intersection of affect and racialization processes, either historically or in contemporary contexts. This paper situates the diachronic articulation of race and affect-particularly in terms of the historical everyday lives and the political, economic, and material contexts of populations from Latin American and Caribbean backgrounds-in anthropological studies of "racialization" and the "affective turn." Drawing on a broad reading of both scientific and popular constructions of affect among Latin American and US Latino populations, we propose the concept of "racialized affect" to account for the contradictions embedded in the study of race and affect, both separately and at their intersections. We highlight what we see as the two cornerstones of our theoretical intervention: on the one hand, a conception of "liable affect" results in a simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other, and, on the other hand, a conception of "empowering affect" perpetuates the privileged and nuanced affective subjectivity frequently reserved for whites in the United States and for self-styled "whitened" elites in Latin America.