This chapter begins by thinking with Toni Morrison's novel Beloved and her notion of a “too thick” love. Too thick feeling is a racially gendered problem for affect theory, one that not only exposes the latter's residual humanisms but that opens onto the possibility of thinking with the minor affective registers of Black existence. Highlighting the conjunction between Black critiques of humanism and those repertoires of wayward feeling that subtend Black existence, this chapter argues that too thick feeling moves us through the undertheorized racially gendered declensions and transfigurations within registers of feeling such as slowness, exhaustion, bitterness, and perseverance. Moving between Beloved and Charles Burnett's 1978 film Killer of Sheep, the chapter suggests that this indeterminate genre of feeling emerges precisely through its immanent exposure to and subjection before an anti-Black world that demands but cannot abide its intelligibility.
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