Editors

 

 
The editors seeks contributions for a collection that explores “feeling” and “emotion” as rubrics for understanding the complexities of Black American race, gender, and sexuality. By framing an examination of the Black American experience through “feeling,” this volume aims to call attention to the ways research informants negotiate their identities and navigate the affective dimensions of power within their communities. The volume will provide texture to the literature on race, sexuality, and gender in the U.S., focusing on how Black Americans feel as they experience their racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, and how they connect with other individuals (including the researcher) through similar and/or divergent emotional experiences.

 
Please send a 350-500 word abstract and CV to jwoodruf@bates.edu and Bianca.robinson@colorado.edu by February 1, 2010. Notification of accepted proposals will be made by March 1, 2010. First chapter drafts of 6000-7000 words will be due around June 2010. More information on the collection’s theme is included below:

 
In a public dialogue held at the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist John L. Jackson and English professor Frederick C. Moten put forth the proverbial question, “Do you feel me?” in order to draw attention to the tensions and disconnects people feel as they build relationships within the African Diaspora. Moten argued that the question should be read as both “a translation and an articulation,” suggesting that the query itself claims, “you get it, but you don’t understand.” This volume takes up Jackson’s and Moten’s inquiry about “feeling” and its link to differentials of power, in order to use “affect” and “emotion” as rubrics for thinking through the ways people experience racialized, gendered, and sexualized processes differently, and position themselves within these discourses. While recognizing the significant contributions theorists of intersectionality have made to the analysis of power and subject formation, we propose “feeling” as a productive analytic tool for examining how race, gender, and sexuality not only intersect, but are always inextricably linked. Instead of studying large structures or institutions, we aim to place an anthropological emphasis on people as mediators of racialized, gendered, and sexualized experiences in local and transnational spaces, and discuss how these individuals feel as they participate in, and work against, racist, sexist, and homophobic discourses.

 
Additionally, we seek to explore how subjects may use affect and emotion to speak to those differences of power embedded within the relationship between informant and research ethnographer. In those critical moments when informants implicitly or explicitly ask the ethnographer, “Do you feel me?,” they are often gesturing towards an embrace of the ethnographer’s racialized, gendered, and sexualized credentials (“yes, you are one of us”), or a disavowal (“you may study me, you may feel me, but you will never fully understand me”). This collection explores how “feeling” and “emotion” contribute to the ever-changing racialized, gendered, and sexualized contours of the Black American experience(s) by asking the complex question “Do you feel me?”