Resumen de Postcolonial Affect: In Response
Because Cruel Optimism extends a line of inquiry surrounding heteronormative imperatives of citizenship that emerge as genres of "intimacy" in Berlant's earlier texts, it is especially evocative for postcolonial questions surrounding the narrative constraints that dictate "what counts as a life" (Berlant, Intimacy 286).2 Cruel Optimism articulates the double bind of an attachment to an object of fantasy and futurity ("the good life") that both thwarts one's capacity to thrive while remaining necessary to sustain life and survival (Berlant, Cruel Optimism 2). In response to a question about queer activists' criticisms of the LGBTQ community's emphasis on same-sex marriage, Berlant states: [...]I said, "I'm on the side of people's survival, and if people's optimism is attached to things like the state, I want to know what the state stands in for." If we start seeing our objects of ambition and desire as stand-ins, as things that organize our attachment to life, we can have a totally different understanding and a kind of generosity toward those objects. Hemsley contests this paranoid position in relation to Ondaatje's aestheticizing of dye and tanning workers by reading affect in the (im)material properties of skin and breath to foreground, as she puts it, "the uneven allocation of epidemiological burden" in the context of "the racialising demarcations of Canada's settler-industrial complex" (88, 69).
