14319-BUA

SoSe 24: Minor affects. Affect, Democracy and Minority Questions

Schirin Amir-Moazami

Information for students

For BUA students only. Reservation via E-Mail bua@studium.fu-berlin.de to BUA Office, Mr. Hutzler.

Comments

In the scholarship on affect and emotions, “minor affects” pertain to affect and emotions of minoritized groups, oftentimes racialised minorities (Ural&Berg 2019). At the same time minor affects refer to “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005), i.e. negative emotions and uncomfortable feelings that are usually assigned to minoritized groups who do not uphold the façade of a harmonious democratic society or who do not comply with diversity management as “happy talk” (Ahmed 2012). Most democratic theories, in turn, have bracketed affect and emotions altogether for the sake of rational argumentation and bureaucratised proceduralism. Democratic theorists who emphasized the necessity to take affect and emotions seriously, on the other hand, have remained rather silent when it comes to democratic aspirations and practices of marginalized constituencies. Liberal democratic theories have limited their inquiry to questions and extensions of minority rights while leaving the ingredients of liberal theories themselves untouched. This Master seminar and lecture series addresses the “liberal illusion of a pluralism without antagonism” (Mouffe 1996: 146) and explores the roots of conflict and antagonism in formally liberal democratic societies deriving from affective ties to worldviews. Instead of bracketing, privatizing or consensualising antagonistic wordviews, of social live and practices, we ask how democracies could provide spaces for spelling out affects and antagonisms while guaranteeing social justice and peace. Moreover, we centre emotions, democratic aspirations and practices of racialised minorities as potential repertoires for democratic theorizing rather than as dangerous emotions that need to be swiftly suppressed. In the seminar we will get acquainted with the relevant clusters of research on affect/emotions, minority as well as relevant democracy theories. The seminar will be accompanied by an international lecture series with guest speakers who deal with the topics of the seminar. close