Resumen de Introduction: Postcolonial Affect
For Massumi, the "surfeit" of affect in contemporary "information- and image-based late-capitalist culture" ("Autonomy" 88) requires description and analysis not possible within the theoretical, discourse-centered rubric of "social constructivism" (100). Among the new rubrics that Lazarus proposes for the study of postcolonial literature are attention to what Raymond Williams calls "structures of feeling" (Williams 132): "the attempt to portray the texture of life as it is experienced, not merely in its objective but also in its subjective aspects—to afford the reader a lens onto lives that might be socially restricted and miniature in scope, but which are nonetheless construable in representative terms, as 'typical' or, if not quite so much, as 'emblematic'" (Lazarus 79). To the degree that one of the tasks of postcolonial studies has been to "keep open the question of what constitutes the human" (Durrant 13), the opportunities to extend and deepen such work are manifold. Palmer demonstrates the "unthinkability of Black feeling within the onto-epistemological framework that is foundationally anti-Black" (32); affect theory, Palmer clarifies, "offers no language with which to approach the sensorial dimensions of ontological negation" (51).
