Placing faith in affect is anti-black---it presumes a myth of relationality that obscures fungibility AND papers over the violence that strips black linguistic transgression of transformative capacity.

Perhaps the most overt instantiation of this resistance to difference can be found in the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, where Gregg and Seigworth position affect (theory) as a transcendent force that allows us to move beyond the body’s “seeming surface-boundedness” by theorizing “bodies defined not by an outer skin-envelope . . . but by their potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of affect.”31 One can interpret this as a gesture toward, and a moving-beyond, the “surface-boundedness” of race, in general, and blackness in particular, which is always already inscribed onto the skin. Implicit in much of the work within affect theory—even that which explicitly engages “race”32—is that an understanding of affect is central to moving beyond static conceptions of racial difference.

In her essay “Affective Economies,” Sara Ahmed mobilizes a Marxist framework in order to consider the ways in which affects/emotions circulate between bodies and objects. She argues that “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’ . . . emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities . . . through the very intensity of their attachments.”33 Ahmed continues, “Emotions work as a form of capital [and are] produced only as an effect of [their] circulation.”34 In her move away from a conception of emotions as personal property—as residing solely within a subject— Ahmed posits a break from Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis through the decentering of the subject and the reframing of affective economies as social and material rather than solely psychic processes. She makes an important intervention by removing emotion from the realm of the individual, and pointing toward the ways in which feelings are “shaped by histories . . . of production, circulation [and] exchange.”35 However, her appraisal of emotion as social material that circulates between subjects assumes an equal structure of relation between all subjects. Taking the metaphor of emotion-as-currency a bit further, one might ask: What happens when one’s form of currency is not accepted? Ahmed’s affective economy is strained when one considers that “the Black has no social relation(s) to be either masked or unmasked . . . in a structural sense . . . the matrix of violence [in which blackness is imbricated] makes Black relationality an oxymoron.”36 The Black, instead, stands as a fungible object upon, around and through which affect accumulates, yet whose own affective power is of no consequence.

Black fungibility—the reduction of the Black to a commodified, interchangeable object that can be endlessly exchanged and made to serve innumerable purposes—is the product of the originary violence of transatlantic slavery. As Calvin Warren notes, racial chattel slavery marked the moment in which, for the African, “Being was objectified, infused with exchange value, and rendered malleable within a sociopolitical order.”37 This very malleability, or “fungibility,” as an ontological fact of blackness, positions the Black body as an abstraction upon and through which the desires, feelings, and ideas of others are projected.38 Within this schema, notions of Black sentience and Black interiority are foreclosed or heavily circumscribed, as social value lies in the Black’s status as an implement; an instrument accumulated for the pleasure, enjoyment, and feeling of the Subject; a “being for the captor.”39 Surely, the object-status of the Black is produced, and kept in place, in relation to the Human-as-Man, but the fungibility of blackness precludes intersubjective relationality, since it figures the Black as an endlessly accumulable object rather than a subject in/of civil society. This fundamental fact of blackness is lost in affect theory’s (limited) engagement with race, and troubles Ahmed’s affective economy.

Ahmed invokes Frantz Fanon to speak of the ways in which “the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds,”40 demonstrating how fear circulates and constructs racial recognition. Reading Fanon’s primal scene,41 she argues that “fear does not reside in a particular object or sign . . . allow[ing it] to slide across signs, and between bodies.”42 Yet Ahmed’s invocation of Fanon serves to undermine her argument—she gestures toward this when she asks, rhetorically, “But doesn’t this example show us that fear does get contained by an object, in this case the Black man?”43 Indeed, the fungibility of blackness positions the Black as the embodied object of fear within the onto-epistemological order of Western Man. In other words, fear does not merely “stick” to the Black body; rather, the Black body signifies fear at the level of ontology. Fanon notes this in his outlining of negrophobia and negrophilia as the two pillars of the libidinal economy of anti-blackness. As I will argue later through a reading of Rankine’s Citizen, the Black’s structural position produces a crisis of affective recognition. As Ahmed acknowledges, “The white child [in the Fanonian moment] misrecognizes the shivering of the Black body as rage.”44 The Black body’s shivering—because of the cold weather, but also arguably indicative of a complex affective response to being hailed a “dirty nigger”45—is only legible to the white gaze as the sign of an irrational, violent anger. Due to the fixity of the Black’s structural position, blackness’s circulation within affective economies is characterized by a continual “misrecognition” and illegibility, and the nullification of Black subjectivity.