Critical emotions: Affect, politics, and ethnic American literature in an age of global capitalism

In this dissertation, I analyze the relationship between the emotions of racial minorities and global capitalism. I argue that the dialectical relationship between human feeling and capitalist production is an especially pressing concern for people of color in the United States today. To understand the social reality of people of color as producers and consumers in global capitalism is to take seriously the emotions that express and structure the critical consciousness of minorities. In the first part of the dissertation, I analyze the ways in which the emotions generated by global capitalism affect formations of racial identities, as reflected in the politics of multiculturalism and consumerism. In the second part, I pursue this analysis in literature written by people of color during the past forty years---a time period encapsulating a new moment in capitalism that Marxist critics have identified as "postmodernism." I present my critique of emotions as an analysis of the limiting effect postmodern capitalism has on racial minorities' expressions of themselves as critical social subjects.;My analysis of minority politics and ethnic American literature is informed by Marxist critiques of fragmented emotion, history, and identity in postmodernism. Exploring the importance of human feeling in dialectical formations of racial identity in U.S. ethnic literature, I focus on the negative feelings of shame, anger, and melancholia in Audre Lorde's Zami, James Baldwin's Another Country, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, and Jessica Hagedorn's The Gangser of Love. Through analysis of this literature, as well as criticism of consumer multiculturalism in popular media and transnational advertising, I demonstrate how racial identities emerge from an emotional process that calls upon minorities to mediate historically based feelings of anger, shame, and melancholia, on the one hand, and the euphoria, indifference, and cynicism generated by postmodern consumer culture, on the other. This process of an emotionally based identity formation, which I call affect-identity, describes how minority subjects engage dialectically with the "joyous" and psychologically numbing affect of consumption and the negative emotions of pain associated with labor, which tie minority people to community and a genealogy of ethnic forebears or immigrant ancestors.