Earthly Encounters: Sensation, Feminist Theory, and the Anthropocene (SUNY series in Gender Theory)

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. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 16 Why Sensation? 21 Phenomenology of Perception 23 Lived Bodies: Nature-Culture-Power 28 “Philosophy” and Feminist Theory 33 The Turn to Affect 36 Chapter Outline 38 One Feeling Cold: Phenomenology, Spatiality, and the Politics of Sensation 40 Phenomenology, Affect, and Emotion 43 A Cold That Goes through Your Bones 46 Territory and “The Subject” 55 A More-Than-Human World 58 Two Locating Affect, Swimming Underwater 60 Affect Underwater 61 Affect and Positionality 64 Swimming and the Autobiographical 68 Autobiography, Writing, and the Aesthetic 79 Postscript: In the Swimming Pool 81 Three “Being Kissed by Everything”: Race, Sex, and Sense in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power 84 Race, Sex, and Space 89 Sensation and the Land 93 Sovereignty of the Senses 101 Four Psychic Territory, Appropriation, and “Geopower”: Rereading Fanon, Foucault, and Butler 104 Geopower: The Force Relations that Transform the Surface of the Earth 106 From Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth 109 Decolonization, Appropriation, and the Psyche 114 Sexual Difference, beyond Appropriation? 120 Five Location, Sensation, and the Anthropocene 124 Introducing “Earth System Science” 128 Universalisms at Play 132 Multinaturalisms, Sensation, and Amazonian Cosmology 136 Sensation and the Anthropocene 141 Air (Auto-Immune Response) 145 Concerning Angels 150 Notes 152 Bibliography 188 Index 212