Affect Studies
Authors: Arthur Mathew 
Published: January 2021

Across and between political, cultural, literary, and media theory; feminist, Black, queer/trans, and disability studies; neurohumanities; critical anthropologies and geographies; ethnographic or other compositional methods; performance pedagogies; and empiricist philosophies, the notion of “affect” shifts the impetus of study toward imbrications of body and world that move at the fringes of attention, overwhelm description, or have historically been neglected. The word “affect” holds a glut of meanings in generative drift: from emotion, feeling, mood, sensation, and vibe to action, atmosphere, capacity, force, intensity, potential, or relation. Affect studies attend to those near-imperceptible, too-intense, interstitial, or in-the-making visceral forces and feelings that accompany and broker the entangled material—especially bodily—and conceptual potentials of an emergent or historical phenomenon. Affect can be invoked in the singular to gesture at an indivisible field of affecting intensities or as plural affects to give contour to specificities of event or encounter and vectors of experience. It is a rangy term that resists any easy genealogical tack, with roots spanning philosophy, psychoanalysis, and later, cultural studies. Myriad non-Western ways of knowing have long been alert to the unruliness of world- and subject-making forces beyond the capture of stratifying knowledge formations. As such, historicizing affect as a field of study hazards mistaking the citational scaffolding and circulation of a galvanizing instance of critical theory for a heterogeneity of approaches to a world in flux and wider-ranging notions of subjectivity. At base, and with political and ethical implications for subjectivity and knowledge work, affect studies short-circuit inherited representational schemes in the temporary bracketing-out of categories like cognition, intentionality, or language (as delimited from a wider field of emergence) in order to inquire of the forces and feelings that ongoingly make and are made by human, nonhuman, nonliving, and incorporeal bodies in movement, impasse, and encounter. From new materialist political ecologies to feminist of color cultural politics of emotion, affect studies rewire and disrupt configurations of and connections between the sciences and humanities, working ethologically and pedagogically to home in on the harnessing and sedimenting felt intensities that characterize an event, process, or set of relations, all the while stretching disciplinary problematics and methods. Affect calls into question the taken-for-granted status of the human and the body in science, theory, literature, and media. It is an analytic of power that takes capacities of affecting and being affected—and how such capacities are written into variously configured theoretical frameworks—as relentlessly political and informing constructions of race, sex, gender, ability, and debt. As a constellation of texts, sensibilities, theoretical stylings, and methods, affect’s ambit of expression is capacious: politicizing philosophies of immanence; writing with the always-shifting interface of bodies, knowledges, and their surrounds; and attuning to everyday vicissitudes entangled in wider forcefields of nature, culture, or technology. Given affect’s reach, this bibliography is not comprehensive but aims instead to give a sense of the theoretical and interdisciplinary liveliness of affect inquiry.