[Panel, Virtual]

Affect theory has grown largely within Euro-American frameworks, from Berlant's neoliberal America to Stewart's account of the American ordinary. Sara Ahmed's work on the cultural politics of emotion has been pivotal in reorienting the field toward race, migration, and colonial power, showing how feelings attach differently to racialized and gendered bodies. This panel builds on that reorientation. It asks what happens when affect theory travels more fully into postcolonial and diasporic contexts, where the body in question has been shaped by colonial histories, forced migration, and asymmetrical encounters with Western institutions. How do structures of feeling shift under these conditions, and where do existing frameworks reach their limit?

The panel takes postcolonial and diasporic texts as active interlocutors, capable of pressuring, revising, and extending theory rather than simply illustrating it. We invite papers that attend to the specific conditions under which feeling circulates, accumulates, and fails to discharge in migrant and postcolonial experience. How does testimony feel from the position of the postcolonial subject? What does care cost in communities shaped by colonial injury and displacement? Objects, spaces, and bodies carry affective residue across cultures and histories in ways that ask for new forms of attention and recognition.

Papers might engage fiction, film, digital media, and visual culture from postcolonial and diasporic traditions, attending to the affective dimensions of migrant and colonial experience. We welcome contributions grounded in affect theory, postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and media studies. Graduate researchers and faculty are encouraged to apply.