The recent “affective turn” derives from a Spinozist interpretation and complication of the dualist mind-body binary. The mind’s power to think is intimately entangled with and correlated to the body’s power to act. Affect refers to the body’s capacity to affect and be affected, to its sensitivity and connection to other bodies. Recent interpretations of affect link it to everyday modes of production, circulation, and consumption as well. For example, for Sara Ahmed affects, just like emotions, “stick” as they circulate between bodies and thus produce subjectivities that disrupt or reconfigure a status quo.

Coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his magnum opus Black Marxism (1983), the term “racial capitalism” refers to the simultaneous and interdependent rise of global capitalism and racial classification and stratification. Robinson’s principal goal is to identify a tradition of radical thought and practice among Black intellectuals and activists in sites of colonial exploitation. He therefore decenters Marxist history by shifting our attention away from metropolitan Europe as a site of political radicalization. Black Marxism begins, however, in the European Middle Ages, which in Robinson’s view gave rise both to modern myths of whiteness and to the racialization of the proletariat.

Keynote speakers:

Dr. Mishuana Goeman

Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies, UCLA

Dr. Robert Warrior

Distinguished Professor of American Literature & Culture, University of Kansas

PAMLA 2021 LAS VEGAS: "CITY OF GOD, CITY OF DESTRUCTION" (Thursday, November 11 - Sunday, November 14, 2021 at Sahara Las Vegas Hotel, hosted by University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Session: Cult America

Contacts: Craig Svonkin, Metropolitan State University of Denver (director@pamla.org)