Earthly Encounters develops a fuller account of the lived experience of racialized gender formation as it exists on this planet, earth. It analyzes sensations: the chill of winter, the warm embrace of the wind, the feeling of being immersed in water, and a stifling sense of containment. Through this analysis in settler colonial and colonial contexts, in twentieth-century North America and Africa, Stephanie D. Clare shows how sensation is unevenly distributed within social worlds and productive of racial, national, and gendered subjectivities. From revealing the relevance of phenomenology, especially in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, to debates concerning new materialism and affect theory, Clare shows how the phenomenology of race and gender must consider both the production of the body-subject and the environment. She concludes by making a case for the continued significance of sensation in the context of the Anthropocene.
Author(s): Stephanie D. Clare
Series: SUNY series in Gender Theory
Publisher: SUNY Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 222
City: Albany
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Why Sensation?
Phenomenology of Perception
Lived Bodies: Nature-Culture-Power
“Philosophy” and Feminist Theory
The Turn to Affect
Chapter Outline
One Feeling Cold: Phenomenology, Spatiality, and the Politics of Sensation
Phenomenology, Affect, and Emotion
A Cold That Goes through Your Bones
Territory and “The Subject”
A More-Than-Human World
Two Locating Affect, Swimming Underwater
Affect Underwater
Affect and Positionality
Swimming and the Autobiographical
Autobiography, Writing, and the Aesthetic
Postscript: In the Swimming Pool
Three “Being Kissed by Everything”: Race, Sex, and Sense in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
Race, Sex, and Space
Sensation and the Land
Sovereignty of the Senses
Four Psychic Territory, Appropriation, and “Geopower”: Rereading Fanon, Foucault, and Butler
Geopower: The Force Relations that Transform the Surface of the Earth
From Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth
Decolonization, Appropriation, and the Psyche
Sexual Difference, beyond Appropriation?
Five Location, Sensation, and the Anthropocene
Introducing “Earth System Science”
Universalisms at Play
Multinaturalisms, Sensation, and Amazonian Cosmology
Sensation and the Anthropocene
Air (Auto-Immune Response)
Concerning Angels
Notes
Bibliography
Index
