ABSTRACT
If, as postcolonial studies have shown, the enslaved and the colonies were central to the economic and social making and development of the metropole, so too the colonized and enslaved’s affects are central to the affective development of those at the centers of empire. As neoliberalism makes capital accumulation increasingly flexible, so too the empire imagines an economy on a global scale. When students at the University of Virginia Medical School were asked how pain is experienced by different people, most thought Blacks felt less pain than Whites. They were also asked the extent to which various statements about biological differences were true or untrue; for example, that Blacks age more slowly than Whites, their nerve endings are less sensitive, their blood coagulates more quickly, and their skin is thicker. The emergence and repurposing of sexual affective empire solicits the production of particular ways of feeling, being, desiring, and knowing that make viable a reconstituted imperial world order.
