Affect Theory/Embodiment and the Archive: Purnima Mankekar

The research activities of Purnima Mankekar, Associate Professor in the Departments of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, engage interdisciplinary theories of affect at the interstices of transnational cultural, gender, and postcolonial studies. Her book, Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality, will be published by Duke University Press in 2015. It explores how circular media flows inform the construction of racialized and gendered identities of Indianness at home and in the diaspora—applying feminist anthropological methods to a transnational cultural study of media. The book is based on Professor Mankekar’s long-term ethnographic research across New Delhi and the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Her aim is to break the binary oppositions between home and abroad, belonging and unbelonging, by addressing what it means to feel Indian through the popular cultural objects that continually move through the global market, including Bollywood films, Hindi TV shows, and ethnic specialty produce. The book’s fresh outlook on unsettlement as an alternative to the unidirectional flow from the West to India builds on Mankekar’s prior studies on the relationship between commodity affect, gender and sexuality, and nation on Indian television. 

Her next project is a collaborative venture with Akhil Gupta, involving ethnographic field research on call centers in Bangalore. She is also completing a book on the racial violence against South Asians in the aftermath of 9/11. 

In addition to her impressive research program, Mankekar is also well-respected on campus for her commitment to undergraduate and graduate education. She received the C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies at UCLA for the 2013-14 academic year.

–Dana M. Linda

Dana M. Linda is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature with a concentration certificate in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her areas of research and teaching are Caribbean and comparative literatures, black Atlantic/diaspora studies, and postcolonial geographies of race, gender, and empire. Her dissertation examines Caribbean literary forms that demarcate the postcolonial inheritances of urban space from twentieth century to contemporary conceptions of globalization. Her research and studies have been supported by UCLA Graduate Division, the U.S. Department of Education, the UC-CUBA Academic Initiative, the Mellon Foundation, and the UCLA International Institute.

Affect Theory/Embodiment and the Archive: Marissa K. López

In her book project on “Racial Immanence: Chicano Bodies Beyond Representation,” Marissa K. López, Associate Professor in the Department of English, asks how theories of embodiment illuminate racialization within Chicana/o cultural production. Her research locates the figure of the unruly body to address the historical ambiguities surrounding Mexican American racial identity through bodily philosophies that challenge the geopolitics of subject/object relations on national and global scales. 

López’s study substantially differentiates from the existing humanistic discourses on race in Chicana/o studies by pressing against the conventional assumption that race is not biologically real; instead, she asks us to consider race as a kind of physical, affective experience that strengthens personal and political connections to the material world. López both draws on and departs from scholarship of thinkers like Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett, and Rosi Braidotti to move away from a top-down institutional or sociopolitical interpretation of bodies. In its place, her book works past the body as metaphor for subjectivity by reimagining Chicano bodies of literature and bodies in literature from the 1980s and 1990s to create a material archive whereby race becomes a bodily fact and historical object in the world. Chapter-specific studies cover a dynamic set of comparative texts to address how Chicano artists and writers grapple with the management of brown bodies in transnational American spaces. 

López’s recent publications include “¿soy emo y qué? sad kids, punkera dykes, and the Latin@ public sphere” (forthcoming in Journal of American Studies), “Feeling Mexican: Ruiz de Burton’s Sentimental Railroad Fiction” (forthcoming in edited volume titled The Latino Nineteenth Century), and (with Dana Williams) “More Than a Fever: Towards a Theory of the Ethnic Archive” (PMLA 127:2 [2012] 357-359). López serves as the Associate Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA and is chair of the Modern Language Association’s Division Executive Committee on Chicana/o Literature. 

–Dana M. Linda

Dana M. Linda is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature with a concentration certificate in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her areas of research and teaching are Caribbean and comparative literatures, black Atlantic/diaspora studies, and postcolonial geographies of race, gender, and empire. Her dissertation examines Caribbean literary forms that demarcate the postcolonial inheritances of urban space from twentieth century to contemporary conceptions of globalization. Her research and studies have been supported by UCLA Graduate Division, the U.S. Department of Education, the UC-CUBA Academic Initiative, the Mellon Foundation, and the UCLA International Institute.

Affect Theory/Embodiment and the Archive: Recent Publications by CSW Faculty Affiliates in Humanities and Social Sciences

Jenny Sharpe

The Archive and Affective Memory in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16:4 (2013), 465–482.

When Spirits Talk: Reading Erna Brodber’s Louisiana for Affect. Small Axe 16: 3 39 (2012), 90–102.

Lauren (Robin) Derby

Beyond Fugitive Speech: Rumor and Affect in Caribbean History. Small Axe 18:2 44(2014): 123–140

The Devil Wears Dockers: Devil Pacts, Trade Zones and Rural –Urban Ties in the Dominican Republic. Co-authored with Marion Werner. New West Indian Guide 87:3/4 (2013), 294–321.

Nina S. Eidsheim

Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening. Senses and Society 6:2 (2011), 135–55.

Sarah E. Melzer

‘Voluntary Subjection’: France’s Theory of Colonization/ Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-century Cultural Expression. Edited by Susan McClary (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2013), 93–118.

Affect Theory/Embodiment and the Archive: UCLA Human Rights Archives Symposium

 Held in November, the 2014 Human Rights Archives Symposium featured a series of scholarly and professional presentations on the topic of affect in the archive. The goal of the symposium was to respond to the affective turn across archival and curatorial fields of specialization through direct engagements with archives of public feeling that pertain to experiences of intimacy, sexuality, trauma, and activism. 

Ann Cvetkovich, Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Texas-Austin, was honored as the event’s keynote speaker. Her opening address—titled “Archival Turns and Queer Affective Methods”—outlined some central questions she explores in her latest book in progress, which considers the current rise of LGBTQ archival projects within the co-constitutive contexts of state recognition, civil rights, and cultural visibility. 

The conference included a a broad span of participants from such institutions as University of Arizona, California Institute of the Arts, University of California, Riverside, Occidental College, Monash University, and the UCLA Department of Information Studies. Gender- based thematic concerns covered by the panels included: feminist challenges to rights-based frameworks through an ethics of care, the politics of affective labor and collective memory in domestic and service-oriented work, and the production of sisterhood through handcraft projects in the nation’s oldest Asian American sorority. The event was sponsored by the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) and the UCLA Center for Information as Evidence, Department of Information Studies, Department of English, and the UCLA Library.

–Dana M. Linda

Dana M. Linda is a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA.