Minor Feelings and the Affective Life of Race

This chapter explores the intersections of critical race studies and affect studies in order to place the ordinary life of racialized experience at the center of the affective turn. Additionally, the chapter focuses on the migration of critical race theory and queer feminist affect theory into creative nonfiction and other experimental genres of public writing. The ongoingness of Black death and Black mourning continues to warrant attention, and one aim of the chapter is to account for the histories of the present that inform contemporary approaches to the affective life of racism. The centrality of Black and African diaspora studies to racialized understandings of affect has expanded to produce an “intimacies of four continents” across racialized histories of sensory and felt experience. This chapter also explores how new genres draw from earlier models to put affective experience at the forefront of discussions of anti-racism and racism as ordinary.