FLOWS OF FEELING

Abstract

Postcolonial studies has often figured colonialism as trauma and the “post” as an unresolved spectral remainder of that initial violence. In what ways does the critical turn to affect reshape this analysis of colonialism and open up alternative archives for the reading of postcolonial sensations, emotions, and memories? Affect is notoriously undefinable. The question of measure punctuates the critical debate on the category, surfacing in questions such as whether affect and emotion are equivalent; whether affect is or is not “in” language, whether affect is characterised by the speed of movement or the fixity of instantaneous response in the form of a visceral “shock.” Tracing several genealogies of affect in conjunction with a reading of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, this essay suggests that affect offers a critical alternative to the haunted temporality and melancholic work often associated with the postcolonial novel.