An Iota of Intensity is a Whole World: Exploring Affective Realms Beyond the Binary of Feminist Resistance and Colonial Conformity Ahluwalia, R.K; 0853372

Abstract

“A feminist gut might sense something is amiss. You have to get closer to the feeling” (Ahmed, 2017)

Based on Affect and post-colonial theory, this research explores the colonial entanglement and embodiment of emotions to understand affective experiences in post-colonial contexts from a point of view of passion, in order to highlight an ambivalent post-colonial condition. Fundamentally, this exploration has been inspired by Brian Massumi’s focus on intensity, Sara Ahmed’s insights on happiness, Audrey Lorde’s work on anger and bell hooks’s ideas on love and pain, along with other affect and post-colonial theorists. Ultimately, I aim to “get closer to the feeling” (Ahmed, 2017), almost to its atomic level in order to contribute to the project of decolonisation of emotions through a micro lens; an iota of intensity is a whole world.

I intend to undertake this through highlighting passionate worlds of emotion and experience representing a ‘something’ else, something other than colonial scripts/legacies and tools of subversion. This thought is furthered by Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “third space” (1984) and will delve into breaking the binaries of self and the other, conformity and resistance, so forth, to offer alternate forms of meaning and world-making. In particular, I will work with the following research question: How can the affective experiences of marginalised identities in post-colonial countries and contexts like India serve as catalysts for feminist and decolonial resistance, re-imagination, and the creation of alternative narratives?

The method deployed consists of an ethnographic mix-method approach. The methodology, thus, involves an auto-ethnographic account of my time as a brown woman in Europe; and a decolonial process of co-creation through alternate forms of data collection involving creative, ethnographic and qualitative methodological tools such as in-depth interviewing, participant observation, focus groups, creative and hybrid workshops of collective writing, reading, listening, along with a thorough discourse and critical analysis of the collected data in the form of writing pieces, artworks, interviews and group discussions.