Ordinary Affects

Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

• In the Wake: On Blackness And Being
• The Affect Theory Reader
• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Series Q)
• The Cultural Politics of Emotion
• The Promise of Happiness
• Ugly Feelings
• Cruel Optimism
• The Hundreds
• Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
• Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others