Affect Theory’s Colonial Sources

Abstract:In this article I consider the debt that contemporary theories of affect owe to nineteenth-century universalizing theories of emotion. I ask how and to what extent affect theory, as a late-twentieth-century intellectual formation, remains connected to the race-thinking and civilizational ideology of the nineteenth century which contributed to the emergence of the modern psychological study of the emotions. In order to take up these questions about the triangulation of affect, civilization, and race, I examine the colonial sources on which Charles Darwin drew in his 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Turning to the responses that Darwin received to his 1867 questionnaire, “Queries About Expression,” sheds light on the so-called raw data that still forms the scientific and ideological basis of affect theory today.