Yellow Feelings

Emotional Racialized Encounters and Ornamental Subjectivity

Abstract

This article argues that there is a methodological potency to paying attention to our emotions in engaging with art practices. Taking the author’s own emotional racialized encounter with the photographic works of the artist duo Pixy Liao and Takahiro Morooka as point of theoretical entry, the article examines how emotional reactions, especially ugly ones, can help identify and illuminate the underlying matrices of power feeding structural racism.

Keywords:
affect theory, racialized subjectivity, embodied encounters, ornamentalism, anti-racist methodology, photography