Introduction xxi policing of culture for instances of containment and subversion” (Cvetkov- ich and Pellegrini 2003, para. 4). The point is to shift focus to intensities and flows of feelings through public events and discourses, intimate spaces and relations, connections and disconnections, and desires for belong- ing and identity. Public Feelings and Spaces of Relation In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries named its “Word of the Year”: post- truth, “an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’” (Midgley 2016, para. 1). Oxford Dictionaries’ genealogy of post-truth highlights its affective dimensions: “in 2005 American comedian Stephen Colbert popularized an informal word relating to the same concept: truthiness, defined by Oxford Diction- aries as ‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessar- ily true’. Post-truth extends that notion from an isolated quality of particular assertions to a general characteristic of our age” (para. 6). A post-truth era (if indeed it is a new era at all), underscores the role of public feelings in the social, cultural, and political domains in which the national political sphere becomes “a scene for the orchestration of public feelings— of the public’s feelings, of feelings in public, of politics as a scene of emo- tional contestation” (Berlant 2005, 47). Berlant (2005) points out that the salience of feeling in the public sphere does not mean that the political sphere is devoid of rational thought: “Feel- ings are not the opposite of thought: each is an embodied rhetorical regis- ter associated with specific practices, times, and spaces of appropriateness” (47). To return to Cohen’s (2010) theorization of moral panics, thought, feeling, communities, histories, ideologies, and discourses intermingle. Thus, a simple axiom: not all public feelings are the same. Rebecca Wanzo (2015), for example, explores differing responses to police shootings of African Americans in the United States as a form of “affective segregation” (227), in which White fantasies of fairness and equality conflict with the experiences of communities of color who are subjected to institutionalized state racism. With “[d]isputes over the slippage between feelings and so- called facts” (228), White attachments to a fair system result in the “[n]aturalization of black death as a commonsense outcome” (229), whereas activists such as Black Lives Matter disrupt hegemonic public feelings by “moving their pain and rage into the public sphere” (231). Publicly felt responses to events are one visible form of “affective segre- gation.” Less visible are different affective registers that are constitutive of community formations. In his two “Feeling Brown” essays, José Esteban Muñoz wrote of the failure of the Latina/o subject to perform normative
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