Race and the Senses

The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment

Christopher Brown, Sachi Sekimoto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Race and the Senses, Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown explore the sensorial and phenomenological materiality of race as it is felt and sensed by the racialized subjects. Situating the lived body as an active, affective, and sensing participant in racialized realities, they argue that race is not simply marked on our bodies, but rather felt and registered through our senses. They illuminate the sensorial landscape of racialized world by combining the scholarship in sensory studies, phenomenology, and intercultural communication. Each chapter elaborates on the felt bodily sensations of race, racism, and racialization that illuminate how somatic labor plays a significant role in the construction of racialized relations of sensing. Their thought-provoking theorizing about the relationship between race and the senses include race as a sensory assemblage, the phenomenology of the racialized face and tongue, kinesthetic feelings of blackness, as well as the possibility of cross-racial empathy. Race is not merely socially constructed, but multisensorially assembled, engaged, and experienced. Grounded in the authors' experiences, one as a Japanese woman living in the USA, and the other as an African American man from Chicago, Race and the Senses is a book about how we feel the racialized world into being.

1
Introduction

Feeling Race

Race and the Senses elaborates on the following argument: race is felt and sensed into being. Multiple senses are engaged to feel race and racial differences, and such embodied multisensory feelings are integral to the social, political, and ideological construction of race. We wrote this book as a form of somatic work,¹ in which we engaged our own senses and examined our lived sensations to question, describe, and reveal the social sensorium infused with racial meanings and racialized ways of feeling. That is, the senses are both the object of our investigation and the means of our inquiry. Grounded in the authors’ bodily and sensorial experiences as a Japanese woman living in the United States (Sachi) and an African American man from Chicago (Chris), each chapter explores the lived sensations of racism and racialization by investigating how race appeals to and is entangled with our lived and sensorial embodiment. As coauthors and life partners, we explore the world of race as a multisensorial event, paying attention to how race is constructed, reproduced, and experienced feelingly through our sensory perceptions, affective engagements, and embodied experiences.

Our inquiry into the relationships between race and the senses are driven by two primary purposes. First, while race as a visual construct has long informed and shaped the public and scholarly discussions on race, this book expands the scope of racial theorizing by attending to the multisensory dimensions of race, racialization, and racism. The visual dimension of racial experience is pervasive and undeniable: race functions as a visual economy of difference in which visible phenotypes are coded into hierarchical social relations. Visual perception of race, however, is always intertwined with other sensory, affective, and emotional experiences. Not only do we see race, we interact with its various sensations somatically. We explore how race is not only seen but also felt and registered through multiple and intertwined senses and sensations. Second, we explore the possibility of using embodied experiences and bodily sensations as a source of knowledge. The lived body is both an affective medium of subjective experience and a site where power relations and ideological norms are habituated. We examine bodily sensations and visceral feelings to reveal and problematize how social norms, values, and relations of power are habituated and materialized into lived embodiment.

As we examine the relationship between race and the senses, we seek epistemological possibilities in the realm of feeling. By “feeling,” we do not simply mean emotions, but all-encompassing sensations experienced through somatic, affective, and sensorial engagements in the world. Our approach resonates with theories of embodied epistemology such as the “somatic mode of attention” advanced by Thomas J. Csordas and consciousness as “feeling in the body” as delineated by Kathryn Linn Geurts.² Knowledge is always more than properties in the mind, and the act of knowing is a full-body experience. We use “feeling” interchangeably with “sensing.” The emphasis on feeling shifts our focus from the rationalistic head to the whole body as a location and instrument of knowledge construction. The act of feeling is an ongoing phenomenon that surrounds or envelops our bodies as we gauge our presence in the world. Thus, we write not only about the senses but also through the senses.

The focus on the felt dimensions of race and racism does not mean we can simply replace the critique of symbolic representation, ideological discourses, and institutional construction of race. Rather, the point is to expand the scope of critique to encompass not only the visible (language, discourse, or mental categories) but also the invisible or pre-reflective dimensions of racialized realities (the flows, movements, sensations, and sensuous qualities). Our goal is not to make a totalizing or universal claim about race and sensory experience, nor is it our purpose to essentialize sensory experiences of racial groups or identity. Instead, we sensorialize the inquiry into race to give a fuller, more materially grounded and embodied account of race. In our approach, race is not merely an inorganic “construct,” “system,” or “structure” of oppression, but rather an assemblage of sensuous realities with texture, movement, rhythm, temperature, and weight. Race materializes as a bodily, affective, and sensorial event—something that happens, rather than something that is—that involves ongoing and emergent entanglements of feeling subjects, lived sensations, symbolic interpretations, and discursive/institutional structure.³

The point is not about revealing the falsity of race as a construction, but about how the invented idea gains traction to become and continue to be real in our lived experiences. The mantra of “race is socially constructed” fails to capture seemingly more intuitive and commonsensical perceptions of racial differences. The statement “just because race is socially constructed, doesn’t mean it’s not real” is rather misleading.⁴ Perhaps a more accurate statement is this: “Race is real because it is socially (and perceptually) constructed.” The realness of race is more often implicitly felt and held true without being brought into conscious awareness or logical analysis. Race continues to be one of the most hegemonic constructs in modern history precisely because it is “registered feelingly.”⁵ What we need is not to convince ourselves how race is not really real, but to unpack the processes and mechanisms through which race has become real, perceptually, materially, and experientially.

In the following, we first situate our inquiry within the growing and multidisciplinary efforts to study race and racism from sensory, sensorial, and phenomenological perspectives. Second, we lay out our theoretical perspective that foregrounds feeling as a modality of phenomenological investigation grounded in embodied sensory experiences. Third, we conceptualize the body as a sensuous subject, followed by a discussion of the interrelationships between culture, power, and the senses. Finally, we conclude by addressing our methodological orientation and previewing the upcoming chapters.

The Sensory Turn in the Scholarship of Race and Racism

As a multidisciplinary effort, the sensory turn in social sciences and humanities articulates and accounts for the dynamic and complex interrelationships between culture and the senses.⁶ Extending the sensory perspectives into studying race, various scholars have contributed to this emergent and growing body of knowledge by foregrounding the senses as the medium through which racial worlds are constructed and experienced. For example, scholars have investigated the historical construction of race through the notion of sensory stereotypes;⁷ the role of vision in the perception and attribution of racial differences;⁸ the racialization of vision through the use of images and photographs;⁹ the resistive performance of “loud black girls” in high school;¹⁰ the racialized performativity of black female loudness and Asian male quietness;¹¹ the acoustic space of whiteness;¹² the racialization of voice, accent, and music;¹³ the racialized modes of listening;¹⁴ the racialized scents of urban migrant communities;¹⁵ the interconnection between the visual and the tactile in intercultural cinema;¹⁶ the sensory construction of multicultural urban space in the food market;¹⁷ the intersection between racial identity and food culture;¹⁸ and the theoretical articulation of the sensory apparatus of race.¹⁹ These scholarly contributions demonstrate the role of the senses in constructing, mediating, performing, and materializing race.

In addition to anthropological and sociological studies of race and the senses, philosophical and phenomenological analyses of race and racial embodiment have made significant contributions by foregrounding the lived body as a locus of critical theorizing. Our sensory exploration into race is theoretically informed and inspired by the phenomenological writings of Frantz Fanon; Linda Martín Alcoff’s articulation of racial embodiment; Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of phenomenology of racialized identity and whiteness; Iris Marion Young’s critique of gendered embodiment and spatiality; George Yancy’s account of how the white objectifying gaze surveils and oppresses black bodies²⁰ and Arun Saldanha’s ontological approach to race.²¹ In recent years, scholars such as Emily S. Lee and Helen Ngo have provided critical phenomenological articulations of racial embodiment, demonstrating the significance of understanding race through the lived body.²² Encompassing multiple scholarly disciplines, the scholarship on the interconnections of race, embodiment, and the senses reflects the growing interest in articulating the sensuous existence of race as something material, visceral, and habituated.

In Race and the Senses, we use theoretical insights from phenomenology to foreground lived embodiment, while also tapping into the reservoir of knowledge from sensory studies to emphasize that the body is not simply about what it is or what it does, but more fundamentally about what and how it feels. The body feels as it moves, touches, tastes, hears, smells, dances, sweats, and aches. The body also feels other bodies, and senses other animate and non-animate beings. When it comes to race—and other social identifiers of differences—the body is not merely an object on which racial differences are inscribed, but it is simultaneously the subject that feels such inscription. This book explores the sensuous materiality of race by examining how racialized bodies feel race, racialization, and racial embodiment. While phenomenology allows us to explore lived experience as embodied, research in sensory studies reminds us to attend to the specificity of the sensorial world as culturally coded and socially cultivated.

The sensorial and phenomenological approach allows us to address some of the limitations of the prevailing approach to studying race. In her critique of the social constructionist approach to gender, Asia Friedman aptly points out its limitation to truly challenge what people perceive to be “natural” about gender differences: “Although critically important in the feminist movement, the idea that gender is socially constructed has not been able to erase in most people’s minds what seem like ‘natural’ differences between men and women, and attacks on the idea that gender is socially constructed continue.”²³ The same critique must be applied to those devoted to theorizing or analyzing the social construction of race. Although critically important in the anti-racist movement, the idea that race is socially constructed has not been able to erase in most people’s minds what seem like “natural” differences between races. Friedman argues that the sensory perception is an integral part of the mechanism of social construction of reality: “Reality is experienced—and fundamentally shaped— through our senses. It is only via the senses that the world enters our minds and our experience, and sensing the world is a way of building and reshaping the way the world is assembled.”²⁴ Similarly, David Howes emphasizes the primacy of sensory experience as “an arena for structuring social roles and interactions. We learn social divisions, distinctions of gender, class, and race, through our senses,” and therefore “sensual relations are social relations.”²⁵

The prevailing social constructionist approach that privileges the cognitive and intellectualist intervention often fails to address the deeply embedded racial feelings and racialized habits. David A. Granger asserts that a restricted faith on “right thinking approaches” to challenge racial intolerance and enmity oftentimes has repercussions of revitalizing discursive logics of the mind-body dualisms.²⁶ The current backlash of white racial grievances and more explicit display of white nationalism can be understood as an outcome of the suppressed racist bodily feelings and habits in the name of post-racial society and racial colorblindness. The visceral grip of racism cannot simply be resolved by the logic of postracialism or liberal multiculturalism. The critique of structural racism often results in disembodying issues of race by locating the problem in the inorganic institutions and structures rather than in lived bodies and minds that abide by such institutions and structures. Racial encounters are never completely cognitive or purely institutional. As Friedman argues, race is a social accomplishment—it involves lived, embodied subjects who act, move, feel, think, and experience race with varying degrees of agency and awareness.²⁷ Race is not a static object that circulates within social discourse and practice; race is charged with emotion, affective energy, communal affiliation, moral orientation, gut reaction, bodily rhythms, and multisensorial memories. Race, racism, and racial relations all manifest and morph within the intersecting web of intersubjective sensorial experiences.

Rather than focusing on deconstructing the constructed nature of social reality, we focus on the multisensory and intersensorial conditions in which the invented idea of race becomes sensible and feel-able. Race, at its core, is an idea that provokes our bodily, sensory, affective, and emotional engagement.²⁸ Once it is socially and ideologically activated, the idea of race holds grip on our bodies and psyches.²⁹ In this book, we bring into focus various ways in which we come to know race, seemingly intuitively and commonsensically, through our bodily, sensorial, and affective encounters with others. We believe how we feel race—rather than feel about race—is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about race. Regardless of one’s political affiliation, ideological orientation, or the level of racial awareness, we all live in what Davide ...