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the colonized and the colonizers, the rebel and the authority, etc.
Negative affects such as shame, fear, betrayal, which are results of
the individual’s encounter with the institutional powers and
colonial violence, create crises in everyday life, but are considered
productive in the sense that they prompt individuals to adopt
strategies of survival, and help mold the subjects. Moreover, since
affect is something that moves from one person to another,
breaking the boundaries of the body, my reading seeks to chart the
trajectories of shame
—
examining its capability of linking self and
other in a critical manner, fear
—
exploring its troubled relationship
with truth and power in the public sphere, and how these can be
used to the advantage of the coerced, and betrayal
—
revealing the
categorical instability of moments of historical urgency, and how
that instability motivates practices of comradeship. In this light,
Rosca can be said to refigure ideas of lineage, inheritance, and
history, turning them into events of affective becoming in order to
trace the affective afterlives of colonialism and the possibility of
social transformation.
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I borrow the term “the affective afterlives of colonialism” from Carolyn
Pedwell’s (2013) “Affect at the Margins: Alternative Empathies in
A Small
Place.
” For Pedwell, affects such as anger, shame and confrontational
empathy are affective traces of colonialism, slavery and racism. She argues
that these affects are related for they share some common basic structure.
My use of the term tends to emphasize the productive potential of the
affects in postcolonial subject-making.